Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Colin Smale]

On 2020-07-28 14:41, Dan Glover wrote:

> Other observations, if I may?
> 
> Levels 4 and 6 give UK-wide coverage and level has complete coverage of 
> England. The Combined Authorities are relatively sparse in their coverage (by 
> area - by population is a different matter) so there would be significant 
> gaps in Level 5 under this proposal. Unused Level 7 would "work" in the case 
> of the Greater London Authority - which otherwise doesn't seem to exist 
> except at Level 5 - it has always been a special case. I've not looked at the 
> detailed composition of the Combined Authorities but the problem seems to be 
> they're groupings of entities currently in Levels 6 and 8 (and might straddle 
> boundaries in the current Level 5?) so the hierarchical aspect perhaps cannot 
> be preserved.

I don't believe they currently straddle Region boundaries, but that may
be more by accident than design. They certainly contain mixtures of UAs
and Districts, and sometimes straddle "ceremonial county" boundaries.
This makes it a challenge to fit them into a true hierarchy. 

The GLA is legally a special case, but in practical terms it is very
like a Metropolitan County (now abolished) with Metropolitan Districts
as constituent parts. The London Boroughs are at level 8, so in that
respect the GLA would slot right in at level 6; but the GLA also covers
the City of London, which is currently also at level 6. 

> Stepping back: how is the map data being used? Is a way to identify the 
> Combined Authorities now more relevant than the (English) Government Regions? 
> Should this be handled in some other way than admin_level, which looks as 
> though it's intended for countries where everything is in a strict and 
> consistent hierarchy?

My thought is that the Government Regions can safely be migrated to
boundary=statistical as someone has already mentioned (sorry I forget
exactly who). 

An alternative approach for CAs is to model them as collections of other
objects - in OSM terms, a relation with the constituent area relations
as members. This would allow the individual relations to be given roles
within the CA, thus creating a possibility to include "associate
members" and non-local-authority members (such as fire services which
have their own relations in OSM) that are sometimes legally represented
in the CA governance.___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Colin Smale]

On 2020-07-28 11:45, Ed Loach wrote:

> Colin wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for your message. I would like to challenge one point - your 
>> assertion that the Regions 
>> at admin_level=5 are in "widespread popular use". It is true that many 
>> people talk about 
>> geographical regions like "the South-East" or "the North-West". But these 
>> are ill-defined 
>> vernacular phrases and do not refer to the sharply-defined regions that are 
>> only occasionally 
>> used in governmental areas. If you asked people "is Essex in the South-East" 
>> I expect 99% would 
>> say "yes"
> 
> I must be in that 1% being an Essex resident who lives in the East of England 
> (and gets "Look East" as the local news).

No offence intended of course! It sounds like you are towards the north
of Essex then. But yes, you are right, my use of "99%" was hyperbole to
make a point. Boundaries of TV regions, both BBC and ITV, can also often
appear a bit random to the naked eye and depend to no small degree on
the locations and coverage of transmitters, meaning that my part of Kent
can basically only get London programs unless you have a high-gain
aerial on a pole to get the Kent programs from Bluebell Hill. 

> Admin level 5 is the NUTS 1 regions which as far as I know we are still using 
> to keep statistics from one year to the next even though we have now left the 
> EU. As such it is a meaningful admin level as much as say UPRNs on 
> properties, or references on A roads, or fhrs ids. 
> 
> There is some argument I suppose for changing from boundary=administrative 
> admin_level=5 to boundary=statistical and something to indicate NUTS 1 though 
> (type will have already been used for type=boundary).

That sounds like a good plan to me.___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Ed Loach]

Colin wrote:

> Thanks for your message. I would like to challenge one point - your assertion 
> that the Regions 
> at admin_level=5 are in "widespread popular use". It is true that many people 
> talk about 
> geographical regions like "the South-East" or "the North-West". But these are 
> ill-defined 
> vernacular phrases and do not refer to the sharply-defined regions that are 
> only occasionally 
> used in governmental areas. If you asked people "is Essex in the South-East" 
> I expect 99% would 
> say "yes"

I must be in that 1% being an Essex resident who lives in the East of England 
(and gets "Look East" as the local news). 

Admin level 5 is the NUTS 1 regions which as far as I know we are still using 
to keep statistics from one year to the next even though we have now left the 
EU. As such it is a meaningful admin level as much as say UPRNs on properties, 
or references on A roads, or fhrs ids. 

There is some argument I suppose for changing from boundary=administrative 
admin_level=5 to boundary=statistical and something to indicate NUTS 1 though 
(type will have already been used for type=boundary).

Ed


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Colin Smale]

Hi Sarah, 

Thanks for your message. I would like to challenge one point - your
assertion that the Regions at admin_level=5 are in "widespread popular
use". It is true that many people talk about geographical regions like
"the South-East" or "the North-West". But these are ill-defined
vernacular phrases and do not refer to the sharply-defined regions that
are only occasionally used in governmental areas. If you asked people
"is Essex in the South-East" I expect 99% would say "yes", and asking
people to locate the Isle of Wight in either South-East or South-West
would yield, at best, an inconclusive result. 

Hence my suggestion that admin level 5 for government regions is no
longer in active use, and is therefore available for adoption by the
Combined Authorities. 

I am sure I don't need to remind you of the disconnect in the UK between
a) administrative areas, b) postal addressing and c) people's perception
of "locations"...

Best regards, 

Colin 

On 2020-07-28 09:48, Sarah Hoffmann wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm the one who caused this discussion by editing West Yorkshire. I was 
> looking
> into admin boundaries for Nominatim (the search engine) who uses them to
> determine the place description or address of a place. As part of this I had
> noticed a hole in the admin level 6 coverage and 'fixed' it.
> 
> I have to say that this discussion reflects a paradigm shift in the 
> interpretation
> of boundary=administrative that I find concerning. boundary=administrative 
> used
> to reflect the hierarchical structure of a country as viewed by popular use. 
> That
> is quite practical because it makes it possible to determine reasonable 
> subdivisions
> from the OSM data without having to know how exactly a country is governed.
> 
> Since a few months I notice more and more that people start to interpret
> boundary=administrative in a literal sense and argue that all those where 
> there is
> no direct governmental function have to go away or retagged with something 
> else.
> This 'something else' is often locally chosen without any coordination with 
> the
> international community or any documentation what so ever (try finding out 
> about
> boundary=ceremonial in the wiki if you don't believe me). I fear that we
> end up with a fragmentation in tagging that makes it seriously difficult to 
> use the
> data in a meaningful way.
> 
> Coming back to the issue at hand: the regions on admin level 5 may not 
> exactly have
> an administrative function but my impression is that they are in wide-spread
> popular use. I don't visit the UK often but even I am aware of them. That's a
> good reason to include them in the boundary=administrative hierarchy. Moving 
> them
> to some other tagging schema makes them practically invisible.
> 
> Mixing regions and CAs in admin_level=5 is not a good idea either because it
> breaks the global assumption that the admin_levels create a proper hierarchy.
> Same goes for admin_level=5.5. This would be really unexpected and likely just
> ignored by most consumers.
> 
> Sarah
> 
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 06:41:02AM +0100, Steve Doerr wrote: 
> 
>> Could they perhaps be 5.5 to distinguish them from regions?
>> 
>> Steve
>> 
>> From: Brian Prangle [mailto:bpran...@gmail.com]
>> 
>> I favour admin  level 5 too.
>> 
>> On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 at 23:52, Colin Smale >  > wrote:
>> 
>> The LAs of which the CAs are composed are sometimes Metropolitan Boroughs 
>> with admin_level=8, and sometimes Unitary Authorities with admin_level=6. I 
>> am tending towards admin_level=5; this value is/was in use for the Regions, 
>> but they no longer have an admin function (if they ever had one) so I 
>> consider admin level 5 as "available" for use by Combined Authorities.
>> 
>> --
>> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
>> https://www.avast.com/antivirus
> 
>> ___
>> Talk-GB mailing list
>> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
> 
> ___
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Sarah Hoffmann]

Hi,

I'm the one who caused this discussion by editing West Yorkshire. I was looking
into admin boundaries for Nominatim (the search engine) who uses them to
determine the place description or address of a place. As part of this I had
noticed a hole in the admin level 6 coverage and 'fixed' it.

I have to say that this discussion reflects a paradigm shift in the 
interpretation
of boundary=administrative that I find concerning. boundary=administrative used
to reflect the hierarchical structure of a country as viewed by popular use. 
That
is quite practical because it makes it possible to determine reasonable 
subdivisions
from the OSM data without having to know how exactly a country is governed.

Since a few months I notice more and more that people start to interpret
boundary=administrative in a literal sense and argue that all those where there 
is
no direct governmental function have to go away or retagged with something else.
This 'something else' is often locally chosen without any coordination with the
international community or any documentation what so ever (try finding out about
boundary=ceremonial in the wiki if you don't believe me). I fear that we
end up with a fragmentation in tagging that makes it seriously difficult to use 
the
data in a meaningful way.

Coming back to the issue at hand: the regions on admin level 5 may not exactly 
have
an administrative function but my impression is that they are in wide-spread
popular use. I don't visit the UK often but even I am aware of them. That's a
good reason to include them in the boundary=administrative hierarchy. Moving 
them
to some other tagging schema makes them practically invisible.

Mixing regions and CAs in admin_level=5 is not a good idea either because it
breaks the global assumption that the admin_levels create a proper hierarchy.
Same goes for admin_level=5.5. This would be really unexpected and likely just
ignored by most consumers.

Sarah


On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 06:41:02AM +0100, Steve Doerr wrote:
> Could they perhaps be 5.5 to distinguish them from regions?
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From: Brian Prangle [mailto:bpran...@gmail.com]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I favour admin  level 5 too.
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 at 23:52, Colin Smale   > wrote:
> 
> The LAs of which the CAs are composed are sometimes Metropolitan Boroughs 
> with admin_level=8, and sometimes Unitary Authorities with admin_level=6. I 
> am tending towards admin_level=5; this value is/was in use for the Regions, 
> but they no longer have an admin function (if they ever had one) so I 
> consider admin level 5 as "available" for use by Combined Authorities.
> 
> 
> 
> --
> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
> https://www.avast.com/antivirus

> ___
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Steve Doerr]

Could they perhaps be 5.5 to distinguish them from regions?

Steve





From: Brian Prangle [mailto:bpran...@gmail.com]





I favour admin  level 5 too.



On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 at 23:52, Colin Smale mailto:colin.sm...@xs4all.nl> > wrote:

The LAs of which the CAs are composed are sometimes Metropolitan Boroughs with 
admin_level=8, and sometimes Unitary Authorities with admin_level=6. I am 
tending towards admin_level=5; this value is/was in use for the Regions, but 
they no longer have an admin function (if they ever had one) so I consider 
admin level 5 as "available" for use by Combined Authorities.



--
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Brian Prangle]

I favour admin  level 5 too. West Midlands CA is tagged as 6 which was a
pure estimate by me as being at least equivalent to the constituent LA
members.  Transport is a heck of a slice of its budget and function
(capital £300m and operating £100m) It  also plays a big role in economic
development ( which includes skills development) and strategic planning for
housing (with a big budget for brownfield remediation) and has just been
given a budget of £100m  for taking on the responsibility for adult
education. WMCA also has projects in the area of mental health and I
believe the Manchester CA has responsibility for health generally. So CAs
do have quite a few uber admin functions at a level "above" existing
authorities which the constituent members have relinquished and should be
given an admin level.  Quite how you represent the associate "observer"
members is a puzzle I've steered clear of

regards

Brian

On Sun, 26 Jul 2020 at 23:52, Colin Smale  wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I think we need to discuss tagging of Combined Authorities. I spotted an
> edit that changed the tagging on West Yorkshire Combined Authority, and it
> was pointed out to me that there were already other instances of similar
> tagging for Combined Authorities (Greater Manchester for example).
>
> CAs have basically zero interaction with the public, except for the
> directly elected Mayor; although they have certain statutory tasks (public
> transport etc). They can be seen as a grouping of local authorities, as
> opposed to a LA in their own right. Should they really be tagged as
> boundary=administrative at all? Or should they have a parallel hierarchy as
> is used for police areas for example?
>
> If they are accepted as boundary=administrative, what admin level should
> be used? The LAs of which the CAs are composed are sometimes Metropolitan
> Boroughs with admin_level=8, and sometimes Unitary Authorities with
> admin_level=6. I am tending towards admin_level=5; this value is/was in use
> for the Regions, but they no longer have an admin function (if they ever
> had one) so I consider admin level 5 as "available" for use by Combined
> Authorities.
>
> An alternative may be to represent them as relations containing as members
> the constituent authorities. This would have the advantage of the ability
> (through the use of roles) to distinguish between "constituent councils"
> which are full members and "non-constituent councils" which only
> participate in certain committees.
>
> Any thoughts or comments?
>
>
> ___
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
>
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Colin Smale]

For England (i.e. not Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland): 

* at admin level 6, there should be full coverage, either as an
administrative county or a unitary authority
* at admin level 8, partial coverage - full within administrative
counties, none within unitary authorities
* at admin level 10, partial coverage - complex situation with many
"unparished areas" and "lands common"

In the case of West Yorkshire, the constituent councils used to be
Metropolitan Boroughs at AL8 when West Yorkshire was an administrative
county. These days the constituent councils are Unitary Authorities and
should therefore be at AL6 themselves for consistency with other UAs.
Tagging West Yorkshire at AL6 as well would currently break the model. 

On 2020-07-27 08:55, Frederik Ramm wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On 7/27/20 00:50, Colin Smale wrote: 
> 
>> If they are accepted as boundary=administrative, what admin level should
>> be used? The LAs of which the CAs are composed are sometimes
>> Metropolitan Boroughs with admin_level=8, and sometimes Unitary
>> Authorities with admin_level=6. I am tending towards admin_level=5; this
>> value is/was in use for the Regions, but they no longer have an admin
>> function (if they ever had one) so I consider admin level 5 as
>> "available" for use by Combined Authorities.
> 
> A question that should be considered together with this is: Does/should
> England have full coverage (i.e. no "holes") on boundary=administrative
> with any admin level above 4?
> 
> Situation in many countries is that they "mostly" do on 6, with some
> exceptions for city states, capital districts and the like. I have
> absolutely no idea how this is in England and won't offer any - just
> saying it is worth thinking about. For example, the edit that prompted
> this discussion added a boundary=adminsistrative to West Yorkshire,
> which until then was a "hole" in the AL6 map.
> 
> Bye
> Frederik___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 7/27/20 00:50, Colin Smale wrote:
> If they are accepted as boundary=administrative, what admin level should
> be used? The LAs of which the CAs are composed are sometimes
> Metropolitan Boroughs with admin_level=8, and sometimes Unitary
> Authorities with admin_level=6. I am tending towards admin_level=5; this
> value is/was in use for the Regions, but they no longer have an admin
> function (if they ever had one) so I consider admin level 5 as
> "available" for use by Combined Authorities.

A question that should be considered together with this is: Does/should
England have full coverage (i.e. no "holes") on boundary=administrative
with any admin level above 4?

Situation in many countries is that they "mostly" do on 6, with some
exceptions for city states, capital districts and the like. I have
absolutely no idea how this is in England and won't offer any - just
saying it is worth thinking about. For example, the edit that prompted
this discussion added a boundary=adminsistrative to West Yorkshire,
which until then was a "hole" in the AL6 map.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frede...@remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

[Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and Combined Authorities

[Colin Smale]

Hi, 

I think we need to discuss tagging of Combined Authorities. I spotted an
edit that changed the tagging on West Yorkshire Combined Authority, and
it was pointed out to me that there were already other instances of
similar tagging for Combined Authorities (Greater Manchester for
example). 

CAs have basically zero interaction with the public, except for the
directly elected Mayor; although they have certain statutory tasks
(public transport etc). They can be seen as a grouping of local
authorities, as opposed to a LA in their own right. Should they really
be tagged as boundary=administrative at all? Or should they have a
parallel hierarchy as is used for police areas for example? 

If they are accepted as boundary=administrative, what admin level should
be used? The LAs of which the CAs are composed are sometimes
Metropolitan Boroughs with admin_level=8, and sometimes Unitary
Authorities with admin_level=6. I am tending towards admin_level=5; this
value is/was in use for the Regions, but they no longer have an admin
function (if they ever had one) so I consider admin level 5 as
"available" for use by Combined Authorities. 

An alternative may be to represent them as relations containing as
members the constituent authorities. This would have the advantage of
the ability (through the use of roles) to distinguish between
"constituent councils" which are full members and "non-constituent
councils" which only participate in certain committees. 

Any thoughts or comments?___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [talk-au] Admin Boundaries of Australia

[Andrew Harvey]

On Sat, 2 Nov 2019 at 00:47,  wrote:

> Looks great.
>
> The requestor states that about 75%  of the admin boundaries are missing
> in Australia. I'll ask the user to contact the ML directly.
>

Yep and here's the thread discussing an import
http://gis.19327.n8.nabble.com/PSMA-Administrative-Boundaries-td5921745.html
and
the import page
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue/PSMA_Admin_Boundaries.
I think we came up with a good plan and had a good level of support within
the community, it just fizzled out before we could actually do the import.
With a bit more focus I'm sure we could get over the line.
___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

Re: [talk-au] Admin Boundaries of Australia

[wambacher]

Hi Dave,

Am 01.11.19 um 14:09 schrieb David Wales:
I believe we have a waiver for PSMA admin boundaries. 


Looks great.

The requestor states that about 75%  of the admin boundaries are missing 
in Australia. I'll ask the user to contact the ML directly.


regards

walter, germany

--
My projects:

Admin Boundaries of the World 
Missing Boundaries 


Emergency Map 
Postal Code Map (Germany only) 
Fools (QA for zipcodes in Germany) 
Postcode Boundaries of Germany 
OSM Software Watchlist 

___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

Re: [talk-au] Admin Boundaries of Australia

[David Wales]

I believe we have a waiver for PSMA admin boundaries. 

See here:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Australian_data_catalogue

Regards,
David Wales

On 1 November 2019 11:21:36 pm AEDT, wambac...@posteo.de wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I've been referred to this source for the admin boundaries of
>Australia: 
>https://psma.com.au/product/administrative-boundaries/ I have no 
>intention of importing this data, but would like to know what you think
>
>about the license.
>
>I found http://psma.com.au/psma-data-copyright-and-disclaimer/ and in
>it 
>https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/
>
>The cc 2.5 seems to have the usual requirements like attribution,
>*which 
>is impossible for OSM*.
>
>"Attribution - You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the 
>license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any 
>reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor 
>endorses you or your use."
>
>I suspect that the subject is thereby ticked off.
>
>Regards
>
>walter, Germany
>
>(Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator)
>
>-- 
>My projects:
>
>Admin Boundaries of the World
>
>Missing Boundaries 
>
>Emergency Map 
>Postal Code Map (Germany only) 
>Fools (QA for zipcodes in Germany)
>
>Postcode Boundaries of Germany
>
>OSM Software Watchlist 
>
___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

[talk-au] Admin Boundaries of Australia

[wambacher]

Hi,

I've been referred to this source for the admin boundaries of Australia: 
https://psma.com.au/product/administrative-boundaries/ I have no 
intention of importing this data, but would like to know what you think 
about the license.


I found http://psma.com.au/psma-data-copyright-and-disclaimer/ and in it 
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/au/


The cc 2.5 seems to have the usual requirements like attribution, *which 
is impossible for OSM*.


"Attribution - You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the 
license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any 
reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor 
endorses you or your use."


I suspect that the subject is thereby ticked off.

Regards

walter, Germany

(Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator)

--
My projects:

Admin Boundaries of the World 
Missing Boundaries 


Emergency Map 
Postal Code Map (Germany only) 
Fools (QA for zipcodes in Germany) 
Postcode Boundaries of Germany 
OSM Software Watchlist 

___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle?

[Dave F]

Hi

This situation occurs nationally; it's just been highlighted around 
Nottingham.
I created an admin 10 relation for the city of Bath, but had it pointed 
to me that it didn't have a direct council & so the boundary was changed 
to 'place'

http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5342409

I can probably predict the response, but it might be worth personally 
inviting user Alex Kemp to the meeting.


Dave F.


On 21/08/2016 09:59, ajt1...@gmail.com wrote:

On 20/08/2016 13:33, Colin Smale wrote:


In the East Midlands Alex Kemp has been adding relations for these 
unparished areas, only distinguishable from Civil Parish relations by 
means of the value of the "designation" tag. This is contrary to our 
normal practice and feels counter-intuitive - why add an object to 
OSM which by definition does not exist?





It's pretty clear here that there's a concensus behind _not_ mapping 
these "holes" as admin_level=10 (EdLoach's "boundary=unparished_area" 
would make sense to me), but presumably we can wait until after 
Tuesday (when the next East Midlands pub meet is, and all local 
participants in the discussion will have an opportunity to be there).


Best Regards,

Andy


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb



___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle?

[ajt1...@gmail.com]

On 20/08/2016 13:33, Colin Smale wrote:


In the East Midlands Alex Kemp has been adding relations for these 
unparished areas, only distinguishable from Civil Parish relations by 
means of the value of the "designation" tag. This is contrary to our 
normal practice and feels counter-intuitive - why add an object to OSM 
which by definition does not exist?





It's pretty clear here that there's a concensus behind _not_ mapping 
these "holes" as admin_level=10 (EdLoach's "boundary=unparished_area" 
would make sense to me), but presumably we can wait until after Tuesday 
(when the next East Midlands pub meet is, and all local participants in 
the discussion will have an opportunity to be there).


Best Regards,

Andy


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle?

[Richard Fairhurst]

Colin Smale wrote:
> I was hoping that we could find some middle ground by allowing 
> the relations to persist but outside the admin boundary regime

Yes, I would agree with this. If there's no administration then they're not
admin boundaries.

> If I'm honest I am beginning to doubt whether the existing 
> governance is fit for purpose. 

OTOH, elevating a simple difference of opinion about tagging into a grand
debate about "the existing governance" is a really good way to ensure that
there are 3000 mailing list messages but nothing actually gets fixed.

Richard



--
View this message in context: 
http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Admin-boundaries-for-unparished-areas-how-to-handle-tp5880607p5880618.html
Sent from the Great Britain mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle?

[Colin Smale]

Hi Ed et al., 

Of course I am not asking this on my own behalf, but on behalf of all
stakeholders i.e. "the OSM Community". We have this situation where
these relations have been added, and they are being used by Nominatim
(because of their tagging). The user in question has not shown himself
to be very approachable although that may be personal, as he has
attacked both me and some other mappers when we attempted to debate this
with him. I have no appetite for a tagging war or personal battles. If
the community agrees on a way forward, be that deletion or retagging,
then it should be executed with that mandate. So far there seems to be
consensus that these relations are undesirable, but now what? The user
in question sticks two fingers up when the issue is raised, but if I (or
any other individual) were to bring the situation into compliance by
deleting or retagging, all hell would break loose. I don't mind spending
half an hour sorting this out in OSM, but I want to feel that I have the
support of the community in performing this action and would expect
their support, and this is what I am trying to measure now. 

I was hoping that we could find some middle ground by allowing the
relations to persist but outside the admin boundary regime, so we could
keep everybody a bit happy. I am not interested in being involved in OSM
as a diplomat or a politician. My instinct is that we should be able to
form an opinion as a community, and enforce that. If I'm honest I am
beginning to doubt whether the existing governance is fit for purpose. 

What now?

Colin 

On 2016-08-20 16:57, Ed Loach wrote:

> I don't think we should be mapping things as parishes then adding an extra 
> tag to say "this isn't a parish". It isn't an administrative area so 
> shouldn't have an administrative boundary. 
> 
> At best you could perhaps use something like boundary=unparished_area (no 
> admin level needed, though I suspect people might add 10 so they can extract 
> the full set by admin_level) to keep it separate from the admin and political 
> boundaries. 
> 
> Ed 
> 
> FROM: Colin Smale [mailto:colin.sm...@xs4all.nl] 
> SENT: 20 August 2016 13:34
> TO: Talk-GB
> SUBJECT: [Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle? 
> 
> Hi everyone, 
> 
> There have been some discussions in the past couple of weeks about unparished 
> areas, i.e. areas in England which are not part of any Civil Parish. Civil 
> Parishes are given an administrative boundary relation with admin_level=10 to 
> represent their entity as an administrative area. But the unparished areas 
> are not, because by definition they are not an administrative entity. 
> 
> In the East Midlands Alex Kemp has been adding relations for these unparished 
> areas, only distinguishable from Civil Parish relations by means of the value 
> of the "designation" tag. This is contrary to our normal practice and feels 
> counter-intuitive - why add an object to OSM which by definition does not 
> exist? 
> 
> To an extent I can understand his rationale. Without these areas there are 
> holes left in the coverage at admin_level=10, and often these areas can be 
> correlated to places or former administrative entities, giving more-or-less 
> obvious candidates for names in many cases. Doing this is alleged to improve 
> the behaviour of Nominatim, which sometimes struggles with the complex 
> structures in the UK compared to many other countries. However they are NOT 
> administrative entities, and to tag them as such would be wrong. Words like 
> "tagging incorrectly for the renderer" come to mind. 
> 
> So, ahow *should* they be tagged? What should be done with these unparished 
> areas? Should the existing relations be reverted? Retagged to something else? 
> Should we document this and encourage other admin boundary maintainers like 
> me to replicate the pattern across the whole country? 
> 
> Best regards, 
> 
> Colin___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle?

[David Woolley]

On 20/08/16 13:33, Colin Smale wrote:


So, ahow *should* they be tagged? What should be done with these
unparished areas? Should the existing relations be reverted? Retagged to
something else? Should we document this and encourage other admin
boundary maintainers like me to replicate the pattern across the whole
country?


As a general principle, they should not be present.  Any changes should 
be in the data consumer.


I can think of edge cases where you had better information about 
not-parishes than the adjacent real ones, but I'm not convinced that 
happens often enough to consider.



___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle?

[Brian Prangle]

My vote goes to not mapping them. They don't exist as entities
intrinsically, only as a negative relation of an existing entity

On 20 Aug 2016 1:35 p.m., "Colin Smale"  wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> There have been some discussions in the past couple of weeks about
> unparished areas, i.e. areas in England which are not part of any Civil
> Parish. Civil Parishes are given an administrative boundary relation with
> admin_level=10 to represent their entity as an administrative area. But the
> unparished areas are not, because by definition they are not an
> administrative entity.
>
> In the East Midlands Alex Kemp has been adding relations for these
> unparished areas, only distinguishable from Civil Parish relations by means
> of the value of the "designation" tag. This is contrary to our normal
> practice and feels counter-intuitive - why add an object to OSM which by
> definition does not exist?
>
> To an extent I can understand his rationale. Without these areas there are
> holes left in the coverage at admin_level=10, and often these areas can be
> correlated to places or former administrative entities, giving more-or-less
> obvious candidates for names in many cases. Doing this is alleged to
> improve the behaviour of Nominatim, which sometimes struggles with the
> complex structures in the UK compared to many other countries. However they
> are NOT administrative entities, and to tag them as such would be wrong.
> Words like "tagging incorrectly for the renderer" come to mind.
>
> So, ahow *should* they be tagged? What should be done with these
> unparished areas? Should the existing relations be reverted? Retagged to
> something else? Should we document this and encourage other admin boundary
> maintainers like me to replicate the pattern across the whole country?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Colin
>
>
> ___
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
>
>
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle?

[Ed Loach]

I don’t think we should be mapping things as parishes then adding an extra tag 
to say “this isn’t a parish”. It isn’t an administrative area so shouldn’t have 
an administrative boundary. 

 

At best you could perhaps use something like boundary=unparished_area (no admin 
level needed, though I suspect people might add 10 so they can extract the full 
set by admin_level) to keep it separate from the admin and political boundaries.

 

Ed

 

From: Colin Smale [mailto:colin.sm...@xs4all.nl] 
Sent: 20 August 2016 13:34
To: Talk-GB
Subject: [Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle?

 

Hi everyone,

There have been some discussions in the past couple of weeks about unparished 
areas, i.e. areas in England which are not part of any Civil Parish. Civil 
Parishes are given an administrative boundary relation with admin_level=10 to 
represent their entity as an administrative area. But the unparished areas are 
not, because by definition they are not an administrative entity.

In the East Midlands Alex Kemp has been adding relations for these unparished 
areas, only distinguishable from Civil Parish relations by means of the value 
of the "designation" tag. This is contrary to our normal practice and feels 
counter-intuitive - why add an object to OSM which by definition does not exist?

To an extent I can understand his rationale. Without these areas there are 
holes left in the coverage at admin_level=10, and often these areas can be 
correlated to places or former administrative entities, giving more-or-less 
obvious candidates for names in many cases. Doing this is alleged to improve 
the behaviour of Nominatim, which sometimes struggles with the complex 
structures in the UK compared to many other countries. However they are NOT 
administrative entities, and to tag them as such would be wrong. Words like 
"tagging incorrectly for the renderer" come to mind.

So, ahow *should* they be tagged? What should be done with these unparished 
areas? Should the existing relations be reverted? Retagged to something else? 
Should we document this and encourage other admin boundary maintainers like me 
to replicate the pattern across the whole country?

Best regards,

Colin

 

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

[Talk-GB] Admin boundaries for unparished areas - how to handle?

[Colin Smale]

Hi everyone, 

There have been some discussions in the past couple of weeks about
unparished areas, i.e. areas in England which are not part of any Civil
Parish. Civil Parishes are given an administrative boundary relation
with admin_level=10 to represent their entity as an administrative area.
But the unparished areas are not, because by definition they are not an
administrative entity. 

In the East Midlands Alex Kemp has been adding relations for these
unparished areas, only distinguishable from Civil Parish relations by
means of the value of the "designation" tag. This is contrary to our
normal practice and feels counter-intuitive - why add an object to OSM
which by definition does not exist? 

To an extent I can understand his rationale. Without these areas there
are holes left in the coverage at admin_level=10, and often these areas
can be correlated to places or former administrative entities, giving
more-or-less obvious candidates for names in many cases. Doing this is
alleged to improve the behaviour of Nominatim, which sometimes struggles
with the complex structures in the UK compared to many other countries.
However they are NOT administrative entities, and to tag them as such
would be wrong. Words like "tagging incorrectly for the renderer" come
to mind. 

So, ahow *should* they be tagged? What should be done with these
unparished areas? Should the existing relations be reverted? Retagged to
something else? Should we document this and encourage other admin
boundary maintainers like me to replicate the pattern across the whole
country? 

Best regards, 

Colin___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/01/2016 17:19, Walter Nordmann wrote:

Hi,

any reason why there are only admin boundaries with admin_level=10 in 
Northern Ireland?


No counties (AL6), no cities (AL8), no Suburbs(AL9) - nothing



Ireland (the island) is normally handled as one entity in OSM, so tends 
to be covered by the talk-ie list and the #osm-ie IRC channel.  This 
makes some sort of sense even in the context of admin boundaries as as I 
understand it the underlying Townland etc. structure predates the 
establishment of "Northern Ireland" (the part of Ulster that is in the UK).


Someone from the Irish community has already answered your original 
question over here:


http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=573526#p573526

That links to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Ireland/Boundaries

As has already been said, politically it's complicated... :

http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=573232#p573232

Cheers,

Andy

(not Irish, just an occasional tourist - any locals please feel free to 
correct any of the above)



___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Killyfole and District Development Association]

Hi Walter,

We don't actually have defined cities like in other parts of the world. In 
fact there are only 5 which are classed as cities.  They are Armagh, Belfast, 
Derry/Londonderry, Lisburn and Newry.

Historically, each city had its own council. But recently the councils have 
been merged into what we called super councils.   For example the new super-
council covering Armagh City, now covers a huge area and is called "Armagh 
City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council"  the only completely intact 
council being Belfast City Council.

The boundaries are defined by the OSNI/LPS and up until a few months ago all 
their data was Crown copyright.  They have started to release some data under 
an Open Government Licence but this is a slow, painful process!  The Royal 
Mail also own the addresses and postcodes here and while they have been forced 
to "open" the postcode in other parts of the UK, they still refuse to do it 
here.  This makes all data sources we would need to plot city boundaries are 
copyrighted by various organisations.

I hope this explains the situation here in "Norn Iron"

Clive (KDDA)

On Wednesday 27 January 2016 11:52:12 Walter Nordmann wrote:
> thx, Colin.
> 
> But it can't be ok that there are no city boundaries in N-I any more.
> Ok, counties may be historic now, but Cities?
> 
> see: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=belfast%2C ireland
> 
> only result is a place-node. OMG
> 
> Regards
> walter
> 
> ___
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Walter Nordmann]

thx, Colin.

But it can't be ok that there are no city boundaries in N-I any more. 
Ok, counties may be historic now, but Cities?


see: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=belfast%2C ireland

only result is a place-node. OMG

Regards
walter

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Colin Smale]

Cities in the UK is a title awarded to a "place" by the Crown
(formally). The status has to be awarded to some entity, which is
usually an existing local government unit. Its boundaries are therefore
inherited from the local government unit which holds the city status. 

Not to be confused with "large towns"! 

Colin

On 2016-01-27 11:52, Walter Nordmann wrote:

> thx, Colin.
> 
> But it can't be ok that there are no city boundaries in N-I any more. Ok, 
> counties may be historic now, but Cities?
> 
> see: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=belfast%2C ireland
> 
> only result is a place-node. OMG
> 
> Regards
> walter
> 
> ___
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
 ___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Walter Nordmann]

Am 26.01.2016 um 20:41 schrieb Brian Prangle:

AL10 boundaries came from the OSM Ireland Project on Townlands  rgds Brian


No problem with this. But where are the Cities?

very strange

rgds
walter

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Steve Doerr]

Looks like there is some open data available including 2012 districts (I 
think these are the 'super councils' referred to):

http://www.nidirect.gov.uk/index/information-and-services/property-and-housing/your-neighbourhood-roads-and-streets/ordnance-survey-of-northern-ireland/product-range/digital-products/large-scale-vector-boundary-data.htm

Steve


On 27/01/2016 11:50, Killyfole and District Development Association wrote:

Hi Walter,

We don't actually have defined cities like in other parts of the world. In
fact there are only 5 which are classed as cities.  They are Armagh, Belfast,
Derry/Londonderry, Lisburn and Newry.

Historically, each city had its own council. But recently the councils have
been merged into what we called super councils.   For example the new super-
council covering Armagh City, now covers a huge area and is called "Armagh
City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council"  the only completely intact
council being Belfast City Council.

The boundaries are defined by the OSNI/LPS and up until a few months ago all
their data was Crown copyright.  They have started to release some data under
an Open Government Licence but this is a slow, painful process!  The Royal
Mail also own the addresses and postcodes here and while they have been forced
to "open" the postcode in other parts of the UK, they still refuse to do it
here.  This makes all data sources we would need to plot city boundaries are
copyrighted by various organisations.

I hope this explains the situation here in "Norn Iron"

Clive (KDDA)

On Wednesday 27 January 2016 11:52:12 Walter Nordmann wrote:

thx, Colin.

But it can't be ok that there are no city boundaries in N-I any more.
Ok, counties may be historic now, but Cities?

see: https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=belfast%2C ireland

only result is a place-node. OMG

Regards
walter

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb



---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

[Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Walter Nordmann]

Hi,

any reason why there are only admin boundaries with admin_level=10 in 
Northern Ireland?


No counties (AL6), no cities (AL8), no Suburbs(AL9) - nothing

regards
walter/germany


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Colin Smale]

What is missing, is AL8 - used for "Districts" in the UK. Counties used
to exist in NI but they are now defunct as administrative entities. The
boundaries seem to be (still) there in OSM, but with boundary=historic
admin_level=6. I am not sure where the existing AL10 data came from, and
what these boundaries are used for in practise. 

The problem may be connected with a lack of open data for government
information in NI. They (including OSNI, Ordnance Survey Northern
Ireland) seem to be lagging behind the rest of the UK on that front. 

Interestingly, the UK AL4 boundaries (for the nations of the UK:
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) demarcate the territorial
waters, and not the limits of normal administrative jurisdiction.

//colin 

On 2016-01-26 18:19, Walter Nordmann wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> any reason why there are only admin boundaries with admin_level=10 in 
> Northern Ireland?
> 
> No counties (AL6), no cities (AL8), no Suburbs(AL9) - nothing
> 
> regards
> walter/germany
> 
> ___
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
 ___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries in Northern Ireland

[Brian Prangle]

AL10 boundaries came from the OSM Ireland Project on Townlands  rgds Brian

On 26 January 2016 at 17:38, Colin Smale  wrote:

> What is missing, is AL8 - used for "Districts" in the UK. Counties used to
> exist in NI but they are now defunct as administrative entities. The
> boundaries seem to be (still) there in OSM, but with boundary=historic
> admin_level=6. I am not sure where the existing AL10 data came from, and
> what these boundaries are used for in practise.
>
> The problem may be connected with a lack of open data for government
> information in NI. They (including OSNI, Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland)
> seem to be lagging behind the rest of the UK on that front.
>
> Interestingly, the UK AL4 boundaries (for the nations of the UK: England,
> Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) demarcate the territorial waters, and
> not the limits of normal administrative jurisdiction.
>
>
> //colin
>
> On 2016-01-26 18:19, Walter Nordmann wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> any reason why there are only admin boundaries with admin_level=10 in
> Northern Ireland?
>
> No counties (AL6), no cities (AL8), no Suburbs(AL9) - nothing
>
> regards
> walter/germany
>
>
> ___
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
>
>
> ___
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
>
>
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

[Talk-ht] Admin boundaries level 1, CAR - Lobaye missing in OSM

[Severin Menard]

Hi,

I am not used to admin level addition in OSM and does not know which group
to contact. I have just noticed that one Admin level 1 (called Prefectures)
for Central African Republic called Lobaye (see in
Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobaye)
appears on OSM as a
namehttp://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/4.2916/17.9022layers=Hbut
its boundaries are missing (for a long time, as it
does not appear either on
FOSMhttp://pierzen.dev.openstreetmap.org/hot/leaflet/OSM-Compare-before-after.html#8/4.623/18.138).
They can be found on
Maplibray.orghttp://www.mapmakerdata.co.uk.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/library/stacks/Africa/Central%20African%20Republic/index.htm,
the data source used to provide the admin level 1 in OSM, is there someone
experimented with admin boundaries who could kindly add Lobaye?

Sincerely,

Severin
HOT
___
Talk-ht mailing list
Talk-ht@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ht
Notez! Vous pouvez utiliser Google Translate (http://translate.google.com) pour 
traduire les messages.

Re: [Talk-in] admin boundaries

[H.S.Rai]

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Mikel Maron mikel_ma...@yahoo.com wrote:
 Hi

 I'm looking for Indian state admin boundaries, both current, and from
 previous reorganizations.

Have you gone through:

 
https://bitbucket.org/lawgon/osmindia/issue/4/official-shape-file-for-indias-boundaries

--
H.S.Rai

___
Talk-in mailing list
Talk-in@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-in

[Talk-in] admin boundaries

[Mikel Maron]

Hi

I'm looking for Indian state admin boundaries, both current, and from previous 
reorganizations.

Does anyone here know of how the admin boundaries in OSM were imported? From 
what source?

Searching, I've also found this conveniently, derived from Natural Earth. Do 
these more or less look correct for present boundaries?
http://geocommons.com/overlays/73828

 
Thanks
Mikel

* Mikel Maron * +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron___
Talk-in mailing list
Talk-in@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-in

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Peter Miller]

On 29 May 2012 16:05, Richard Mann richard.mann.westoxf...@gmail.comwrote:

 I think Peter was planning on making the ITO boundaries available as a
 traceable layer, but haven't heard anything about this recently.


You are right. It should be possibly to use ITO Map tiles in Potlatch and
JOSM, however there seems to be glitch at present which we will take a look
at over the next few days and get back to you on this list.

You will probably also be aware that updates for ITO Map have also pretty
much failed since the planet dumps disappeared at the start of April with
the license change. We had initially understood that planet would be down
for about two week and planned to sit it out, however given the protracted
nature of the changeover we are now working hard on a fix that can be used
with the current files and will get us back to daily updates.


Regards,


Peter



 On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Tom Chance t...@acrewoods.net wrote:

 On 29 May 2012 15:44, Colin Smale colin.sm...@xs4all.nl wrote:

 My questions to the community:
 1) Would a bulk upload of any or all of this data be interesting?


 Thanks for raising this, it would be great to get a more complete set of
 boundaries. In answer to your first question, no, please don't follow a
 bulk upload approach. I say this for two reasons:

 1) Most boundaries follow existing features like roads, rivers, etc. They
 need to be manually entered as relations sharing nodes with those features.
 In my experience this is often a nice opportunity to spot other problems
 with very old features using aerial imagery and GPS tracks, e.g. poor
 alignment, or complicated junctions that aren't fully modelled for routing.
 So much better done manually than by dumping a load of new ways into the
 database.

 2) Many boundaries already exist, but are often slightly incorrect, e.g.
 not sharing nodes with existing features but being a little offset. By
 doing this manually you can improve these as you go, especially since every
 boundary shares its properties with one or more other boundaries.

 The best approach would be to identify which boundaries are missing, put
 those up in a list and and encourage people to get us to 100%. Perhaps
 start with counties, then unitaries and districts, then even wards.

 ITO have a nice map of boundaries that people can use to check up on
 them, you can see I started to add wards in Southwark:
 http://www.itoworld.com/map/2






 Regards,
 Tom

 --
 http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance

 ___
 Talk-GB mailing list
 Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
 http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb



 ___
 Talk-GB mailing list
 Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
 http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[David Fisher]

Hi all,
I was just wondering whether, beyond the obvious use of having accurate
boundary data in OSM, the Boundary Line data could also be used to align
aerial imagery, particularly at the closest zoom levels?
For instance, I map in South London, close to multiple borough boundaries.
As a test, I downloaded the (more accurate) 2010 data last night and opened
it in JOSM as a layer along with downloaded OSM data and Bing imagery.  In
certain places the Bing imagery shows obvious geometric shapes such as
building outlines or fences/hedges, which it could reasonably assumed that
the boundary would follow (and of course the more you look along the
boundary line, the more features you can use to make the fit).   It seems
to me to be a valid  useful approach, but I just wondered what others
thought?
Thanks,
David.


On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 5:25 PM, Craig Wallace craig...@fastmail.fm wrote:

 On 30/05/2012 16:11, Jason Cunningham wrote:


 This suggests the original Boundary Line data is superior, but would
 need to be compared to 2012 releases to check boundaries have not moved.

 Does anyone have the original Boundary Line release? and would they be
 able to make them available?


 The previous releases of Boundary Line data are available here:
 http://parlvid.mysociety.org:**81/os/http://parlvid.mysociety.org:81/os/
 http://os.openstreetmap.org/**data/ http://os.openstreetmap.org/data/


 __**_
 Talk-GB mailing list
 Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
 http://lists.openstreetmap.**org/listinfo/talk-gbhttp://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Colin Smale]

I have just refreshed the GPX files. The changes are:
*file names changed - replacing spaces with underscores to minimise 
any possible issues with spaces in filenames
*attribution added - referring back to the OS OpenData source data 
and associated licence
*for admin areas which consist of multiple polygons, each polygon (a 
trkseg in the GPX) is marked in the cmt (comment) tag as outer or 
inner. I know this can be derived from the data as outer polygons are 
clockwise, but it might save someone time/effort to have this 
immediately available in the GPX.


Does OSM have any facility for hosting these files? They are about 500MB 
all together, but they compress very nicely.


Someone suggested I make a wiki page for this. I will try to do that at 
the weekend.


Colin

On 30/05/2012 00:59, Colin Smale wrote:
Having just taken a look at ogr2osm I think that is probably the best 
way of achieving OSM-data with a view to a bulk import. However there 
are lots of disadvantages and gotcha's on that route as several people 
have pointed out. If we were to take that route there would not be any 
point in going further with the GPX files.


I have prepared a set of GPX files (one per admin area) from the main 
OS shapefiles. What would be the best way to get these into OSM? I 
guess it will be a manual process to split the boundary, create a 
relation, transfer the tags from any existing data, and link 
everything up. Can someone who has experience with such things suggest 
a workflow? Personally I tend to work with Potlatch2, but please let 
us all know if there's a better way. I assume (as someone else already 
suggested) the OS is probably the best source available for this data. 
So any existing admin boundaries (counties/regions etc) will need to 
be adjusted by hand to connect up with the district boundaries from 
this OS dataset.


I am currently uploading the GPX files to the following (temporary) 
location:

http://csmale.home.xs4all.nl/os/boundaryline/

Please let me know if you find any anomalies in these files!

Colin




___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Tom Hughes]

On 31/05/12 13:37, Colin Smale wrote:


Does OSM have any facility for hosting these files? They are about 500MB
all together, but they compress very nicely.


Sure - just ask for a dev serv account:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Using_the_dev_server

Tom

--
Tom Hughes (t...@compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Jason Cunningham]

On 29 May 2012 23:59, Colin Smale colin.sm...@xs4all.nl wrote:


 I have prepared a set of GPX files (one per admin area) from the main OS
 shapefiles. What would be the best way to get these into OSM?


Thanks for doing this. I agree use of the data will require individuals
effortt, so I'd suggest creating a wiki page which people could be updated
to show areas status.

I'd like to raise another issue. I agrree that the OS data is as definitive
as we are going to get, but it looks like the recent OpenData releases have
been dumbed down. If you compare the original 2010 releases with the
2011/12 releases then the 2010 release appears, in places, far superior.
Only a few weeks ago I unfortunately deleted my original download of the
Boundrary Data, but to show you what I mean I've put the 'VectorMapDistrict
- AdminstrativeArea' shapefile from 2010, and a Boundrary Line 2011, on a
google image (using qgis).
Green = 2010
Red = 2012
http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd132/jamicu/VectMapDist_AminBoundary_2010vBoundary-Line2012.jpg

You can see the Boundary Line 2012 has lost a lot of data originaly
available.

This suggests the original Boundary Line data is superior, but would need
to be compared to 2012 releases to check boundaries have not moved.

Does anyone have the original Boundary Line release? and would they be able
to make them available?

Jason
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Craig Wallace]

On 30/05/2012 16:11, Jason Cunningham wrote:


This suggests the original Boundary Line data is superior, but would
need to be compared to 2012 releases to check boundaries have not moved.

Does anyone have the original Boundary Line release? and would they be
able to make them available?


The previous releases of Boundary Line data are available here:
http://parlvid.mysociety.org:81/os/
http://os.openstreetmap.org/data/

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

[Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Colin Smale]

Hi,

It seems that the UK administrative boundaries in OSM are rather 
incomplete. I'm looking for advice about the possibility of doing a bulk 
upload of the OS BoundaryLine data for counties, districts and unitaries.


I have conquered the projection issues with the downloaded shapefiles 
and I can now produce GPX files from the OS data, which look good to my 
eye in Google Earth and Potlatch, aligning very neatly to the natural 
boundary features. To do this I have written a program in VB.NET which 
uses MapWindow GIS for the shapefile loading and the reprojection. It's 
not fully ready yet - I still need to add the metadata to the tracks 
from the shape attributes.


My questions to the community:
1) Would a bulk upload of any or all of this data be interesting?
2) As I have no experience of performing bulk uploads myself, how would 
that actually work? Is GPX a good starting point, or should I be looking 
to produce .osm format?
3) This data is very verbose (lots and lots of points). To what extent 
should simplification be considered, using Douglas-Puecker or similar?


I can make a big GPX available (about 300MB), or a GPX per admin unit. 
Then they will need uploading as traces, converting to ways, splitting 
into parts and recombining into relations. At present each entity is a 
polygon (actually a GPX track which ends where it started). Should I 
consider identifying common boundaries and splitting the polygon into 
parts and making the entities into relations? Obviously this won't 
work with GPX format, so .osm would be required for this. There are many 
entities with enclaves/exclaves so these would require multipolygon 
relations. I have not looked at how these turn out in the GPX. I 
probably need to watch for the direction (clockwise/anticlockwise).


Would anybody have any advice about how I could take this further?

Regards,
Colin

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Tom Chance]

On 29 May 2012 15:44, Colin Smale colin.sm...@xs4all.nl wrote:

 My questions to the community:
 1) Would a bulk upload of any or all of this data be interesting?


Thanks for raising this, it would be great to get a more complete set of
boundaries. In answer to your first question, no, please don't follow a
bulk upload approach. I say this for two reasons:

1) Most boundaries follow existing features like roads, rivers, etc. They
need to be manually entered as relations sharing nodes with those features.
In my experience this is often a nice opportunity to spot other problems
with very old features using aerial imagery and GPS tracks, e.g. poor
alignment, or complicated junctions that aren't fully modelled for routing.
So much better done manually than by dumping a load of new ways into the
database.

2) Many boundaries already exist, but are often slightly incorrect, e.g.
not sharing nodes with existing features but being a little offset. By
doing this manually you can improve these as you go, especially since every
boundary shares its properties with one or more other boundaries.

The best approach would be to identify which boundaries are missing, put
those up in a list and and encourage people to get us to 100%. Perhaps
start with counties, then unitaries and districts, then even wards.

ITO have a nice map of boundaries that people can use to check up on them,
you can see I started to add wards in Southwark:
http://www.itoworld.com/map/2

Regards,
Tom

-- 
http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Richard Fairhurst]

Colin Smale wrote:
 My questions to the community:
 1) Would a bulk upload of any or all of this data be interesting?

I think uploading the files somewhere for people to use would certainly be
interesting, yes. You could find some webspace and upload (say)
leicestershire.osm and cumbria.osm and so on.

Because so much boundary data (of varying accuracy) is already in OSM,
updating the geometries using OS OpenData would be by necessity a manual
task - which is as it should be. But having the data easily available is the
first step.

With P2, either .gpx or .osm is fine. One file per admin unit would be
better than one 300Mb file... the latter is almost certain to boggle the
amount of data you can load in-browser!

cheers
Richard



--
View this message in context: 
http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Admin-Boundaries-and-OS-OpenData-BoundaryLine-tp5710573p5710577.html
Sent from the Great Britain mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Richard Mann]

I think Peter was planning on making the ITO boundaries available as a
traceable layer, but haven't heard anything about this recently.

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Tom Chance t...@acrewoods.net wrote:

 On 29 May 2012 15:44, Colin Smale colin.sm...@xs4all.nl wrote:

 My questions to the community:
 1) Would a bulk upload of any or all of this data be interesting?


 Thanks for raising this, it would be great to get a more complete set of
 boundaries. In answer to your first question, no, please don't follow a
 bulk upload approach. I say this for two reasons:

 1) Most boundaries follow existing features like roads, rivers, etc. They
 need to be manually entered as relations sharing nodes with those features.
 In my experience this is often a nice opportunity to spot other problems
 with very old features using aerial imagery and GPS tracks, e.g. poor
 alignment, or complicated junctions that aren't fully modelled for routing.
 So much better done manually than by dumping a load of new ways into the
 database.

 2) Many boundaries already exist, but are often slightly incorrect, e.g.
 not sharing nodes with existing features but being a little offset. By
 doing this manually you can improve these as you go, especially since every
 boundary shares its properties with one or more other boundaries.

 The best approach would be to identify which boundaries are missing, put
 those up in a list and and encourage people to get us to 100%. Perhaps
 start with counties, then unitaries and districts, then even wards.

 ITO have a nice map of boundaries that people can use to check up on them,
 you can see I started to add wards in Southwark:
 http://www.itoworld.com/map/2

 Regards,
 Tom

 --
 http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance

 ___
 Talk-GB mailing list
 Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
 http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Tom Chance]

On 29 May 2012 16:03, Richard Fairhurst rich...@systemed.net wrote:

 Colin Smale wrote:
  My questions to the community:
  1) Would a bulk upload of any or all of this data be interesting?

 I think uploading the files somewhere for people to use would certainly be
 interesting, yes. You could find some webspace and upload (say)
 leicestershire.osm and cumbria.osm and so on.


Oh, sorry Colin, I misread your suggestion. This approach sounds very
useful, thanks.

Tom

-- 
http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Chris Hill]

On 29/05/12 16:00, Tom Chance wrote:
 Most boundaries follow existing features like roads, rivers, etc. 
Not always by any means. Many urban boundaries follow roads, but many 
rural ones run alongside roads and have little jinks in them where they 
cross to the other side of the road. This allows a stretch of road to be 
firmly the responsibility of one administration, not shared. Many 
boundaries follow an old course of a stream, when the stream moved the 
boundary did not.
They need to be manually entered as relations sharing nodes with those 
features. 
I would say that sharing nodes can lead to problems. Boundaries that get 
imported or manually traced from OS data often have no visible reference 
on the ground. If you share nodes with something else, when someone 
aligns that something else to aerial imagery, or a GPS trace or 
whatever, the boundary (which was probably right) gets moved too. Why do 
nodes of one object need to be shared when they are quite different 
objects?
In my experience this is often a nice opportunity to spot other 
problems with very old features using aerial imagery and GPS tracks, 
e.g. poor alignment, or complicated junctions that aren't fully 
modelled for routing. So much better done manually than by dumping a 
load of new ways into the database.
I agree that manual scrutiny is vital. Local knowledge and control is 
also important. Documenting the existing practice would help too.


2) Many boundaries already exist, but are often slightly incorrect, 
e.g. not sharing nodes with existing features but being a little offset.

That offset might be right. See above.

[...]

--
Cheers, Chris
user: chillly


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Colin Smale]

Hi again,

I realise I probably caused some confusion by using the words bulk 
upload when I really intended bulk import. Sorry about that... I was 
thinking about a way of getting all the data into OSM without having to 
do too much manual work. But if people would prefer me to dump the 
individual GPX files on a server somewhere so people can grab their 
local councils and get them by hand into OSM, that's fine by me as well.


I have uploaded an example GPX to OSM with the boundary of Sevenoaks DC 
in Kent. If anybody is interested in taking a look, you can download it 
here (with a bit of luck):


http://www.openstreetmap.org/trace/1242073/data

Colin



___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Ed Loach]

Colin wrote:

 I have uploaded an example GPX to OSM with the boundary of
 Sevenoaks DC
 in Kent. If anybody is interested in taking a look, you can
download
 it
 here (with a bit of luck):
 
 http://www.openstreetmap.org/trace/1242073/data

If people want to create their own .osm versions of whichever
boundaries, the notes I made when correcting broken boundaries are
here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:EdLoach#Correcting_the_bound
aries

Ed


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[SomeoneElse]

Tom Chance wrote:

1) Most boundaries follow existing features like roads, rivers, etc.


That raises an interesting question - how is the boundary actually 
defined?  Is it defined as the boundary between X and Y is the middle 
of the river Z, or has someone plotted a series of points P 
corresponding to the _current_ course of the river and said the 
boundary between X and Y is P?  There are lots of places where 
boundaries (as shown via OS_OpenData_StreetView) don't quite match 
rivers any more - have a look up the River Dove from Ashbourne for an 
example.


If the latter, then clearly the boundary shouldn't share nodes with e.g. 
rivers.


Cheers,
Andy


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[wool...@hotmail.com]

I've been doing a lot of the boundaries in Devon and Somerset, and a lot of the 
boundaries seem to use streams and rivers.  I therefore use the Centre point of 
larger rivers.

I've also come across ox bow lakes and such which the boundary does still 
follow.

Jason  (unieagle)

Connected by MOTOBLUR™

-Original message-
From: SomeoneElse li...@mail.atownsend.org.uk
To: talk-gb@openstreetmap.org
Sent: Tuesday, 29 May 2012 17:39:03 GMT+01:00
Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

Tom Chance wrote:
 1) Most boundaries follow existing features like roads, rivers, etc.

That raises an interesting question - how is the boundary actually defined?  Is 
it defined as the boundary between X and Y is the middle of the river Z, or 
has someone plotted a series of points P corresponding to the _current_ course 
of the river and said the boundary between X and Y is P?  There are lots of 
places where boundaries (as shown via OS_OpenData_StreetView) don't quite match 
rivers any more - have a look up the River Dove from Ashbourne for an example.

If the latter, then clearly the boundary shouldn't share nodes with e.g. rivers.

Cheers,
Andy


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Tom Chance]

On 29 May 2012 17:19, Chris Hill o...@raggedred.net wrote:

 They need to be manually entered as relations sharing nodes with those
 features.

 I would say that sharing nodes can lead to problems. Boundaries that get
 imported or manually traced from OS data often have no visible reference on
 the ground. If you share nodes with something else, when someone aligns
 that something else to aerial imagery, or a GPS trace or whatever, the
 boundary (which was probably right) gets moved too. Why do nodes of one
 object need to be shared when they are quite different objects?


This probably varies according to a number of factors, but where boundaries
are just abstract information coterminous with physical features it makes
sense to me that the objects in OSM share nodes. Many boundaries in urban
areas could just be relations containing lots of roads.

Take the example of someone moving a road but not also moving the boundary.
That introduces an inaccuracy right away. They could also move both but not
bother to get the locations exactly right, say by making the gap between
them larger, getting a kink in the wrong place, or not having them exactly
coterminous. Perhaps they aren't all that interested in boundaries. But
then along another person comes to check if a house is in this or what ward
and they're misled. I prefer to have the boundaries share nodes so that
people are forced to move boundaries with roads/streams/etc. and forced to
break them apart if they really aren't coterminous.

To my mind in these cases boundaries should be treated the same as routes.

Of course if you don't know that a stream and a boundary are supposed to be
related and you go and share nodes because they happen to be in roughly the
same place, then moving the stream to align with a GPS trace obviously
shouldn't move the boundary so you introduce problems.

Regards,
Tom



-- 
http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Chris Hill]

  
  
On 29/05/12 18:10, Tom Chance wrote:

  On 29 May 2012 17:19, Chris Hill o...@raggedred.net
wrote:

  
They need to be
  manually entered as relations sharing nodes with those
  features. 

  
  I would say that sharing nodes can lead to problems.
  Boundaries that get imported or manually traced from OS data
  often have no visible reference on the ground. If you share
  nodes with something else, when someone aligns that something
  else to aerial imagery, or a GPS trace or whatever, the
  boundary (which was probably right) gets moved too. Why do
  nodes of one object need to be shared when they are quite
  different objects?
  
  
  This probably varies according to a number of factors, but where
  boundaries are just abstract information coterminous with physical
  features it makes sense to me that the objects in OSM share nodes.
  Many boundaries in urban areas could just be relations containing
  lots of roads.
  


My question is: how do you know the boundary aligns with an existing
object? If they align, what evidence on the ground do you have for
that? How do you *know* that a road, stream or whatever aligns with
the boundary, other than using other sources such as complete
(copyright) OS maps?

I would say import or draw the boundary based on the OS Open data as
a separate entity from anything else. 

Take the example of someone moving a road but not also
  moving the boundary. That introduces an inaccuracy right away. 

How do you know that? What rule is there that says a boundary must
follow a road? Why, if the OS Boundary data has been used, would you
want to move a boundary unless an administrative change has been
made?

They could also move both but not bother to get the
  locations exactly right, say by making the gap between them
  larger, getting a kink in the wrong place, or not having them
  exactly coterminous. Perhaps they aren't all that interested in
  boundaries. But then along another person comes to check if a
  house is in this or what ward and they're misled. I prefer to have
  the boundaries share nodes so that people are forced to move
  boundaries with roads/streams/etc. and forced to break them apart
  if they really aren't coterminous.


I think some areas such as some landuse can be described as
coterminous and might benefit from sharing nodes. Sharing nodes
between disparate object types causes more trouble than it is worth
IMHO. I don't see how a road and a boundary can be described as
coterminous since there is no evidence of it from a source we can
use. 


  
  To my mind in these cases boundaries should be treated the same as
  routes.


I don't understand that comparison.


  Of course if you don't know that a stream and a boundary are
  supposed to be related and you go and share nodes because they
  happen to be in roughly the same place, then moving the stream to
  align with a GPS trace obviously shouldn't move the boundary so
  you introduce problems.


That's my point, how would you know that a boundary is 'supposed' to
be related to anything else? Are boundaries ever anything more than
arbitrary? They don't exist on the ground, even the boards saying
"Welcome to My Town" are not always placed on the boundary because
of traffic sign placement rules, indeed, most parish boundaries are
not marked, the village name sign is no where near the parish
boundary.

People will do as they think best, and I'm sure some boundaries will
end up with shared nodes - I just don't see the benefit nor the
justification and I do see problems. 
-- 
Cheers, Chris
user: chillly

  


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Richard Fairhurst]

Colin Smale wrote:
 I realise I probably caused some confusion by using the words 
 bulk upload when I really intended bulk import. Sorry about 
 that... I was thinking about a way of getting all the data into 
 OSM without having to do too much manual work.

That won't really fly, I'm afraid - most of the boundaries are already in
there (albeit in imperfect form), so if you import them you'll have
duplicate data. Better to use the enthusiasm of the community to bring the
data in properly.

 But if people would prefer me to dump the individual 
 GPX files on a server somewhere so people can grab their local 
 councils and get them by hand into OSM, that's fine by me as well.

Yes please!

cheers
Richard



--
View this message in context: 
http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Admin-Boundaries-and-OS-OpenData-BoundaryLine-tp5710573p5710619.html
Sent from the Great Britain mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Tom Chance]

On 29 May 2012 18:52, Chris Hill o...@raggedred.net wrote:

 My question is: how do you know the boundary aligns with an existing
 object?


Aha! A very good point.

I suppose in my case because I've been actively involved in canvassing for
a political party for years in the area, I know which wards people on
different streets live on both from maps I've seen at some point, the
electoral register, talking to colleagues who are familiar with wards and
from going round and talking to people on the doorstep who know which ward
they're in. With that all in my head and a clear overlap between boundaries
and features in my local area it's pretty easy to get the wards right.
Perhaps that's not really local knowledge and I should remove the data?

It does raise the question of how worthwhile it is to enter boundaries
where precision is important (e.g. between houses but not so much in the
middle of a rural field) if we have no copyright-free way of determining
exactly where boundaries are.

Regards,
Tom

-- 
http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Chris Hill]

  
  
On 29/05/12 20:16, Tom Chance wrote:

  On 29 May 2012 18:52, Chris Hill o...@raggedred.net
wrote:

  My question is: how do you know the boundary aligns with an
  existing object?
  
  
  Aha! A very good point.
  
  I suppose in my case because I've been actively involved in
  canvassing for a political party for years in the area, I know
  which wards people on different streets live on both from maps
  I've seen at some point, the electoral register, talking to
  colleagues who are familiar with wards and from going round and
  talking to people on the doorstep who know which ward they're in.
  With that all in my head and a clear overlap between boundaries
  and features in my local area it's pretty easy to get the wards
  right. Perhaps that's not really local knowledge and I should
  remove the data?


That sounds like local knowledge to me, but your detailed knowledge
is local to you, not shared by many other people contributing to OSM
and can't be used by everyone to know when a road and boundary line
up.


  
  It does raise the question of how worthwhile it is to enter
  boundaries where precision is important (e.g. between houses but
  not so much in the middle of a rural field) if we have no
  copyright-free way of determining exactly where boundaries are.
  


We have the boundary data provided in OS Open data, which is where
the thread started. It is as close to definitive as we are ever
likely to get.
-- 
Cheers, Chris
user: chillly

  


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Steve Brook]

Hi

Having done the import for the all of the Worcestershire parishes I will add
my views:

It should only be attempted by an experienced mapper who is familiar with
revert and other advanced techniques and can follow the guidelines on the
wiki. The potential to break something is very great, so I would question
making converted data available. Any conversion needs to build the relations
so use something like 'ogr2osm' to create .osm files - a conversion to GPX
will not do this.
Adding data to the map should not be done as a bulk import as there is a lot
of existing data - some imported and some traced from old map sources. Any
data you import needs to be integrated with existing data. Every boundary
will be shared between at least 2 relations and often many more.

The 'ogr2osm' conversion produced way segments that had a common shared
boundary with another parishes and also produced all the parish level
relations. I then just had to give them the right tags - it's much better to
get them right in the editor before upload than to have to correct them
later. Where parish boundaries were also district, county or region
boundaries I elevated the admin level before the import as it made the
filtering during the subsequent tidy up process easier. I also created
temporary relations for the county level boundaries before import to assist
with the later tidy up stage. Some lines on the perimeter of my data needed
to be cut where at the 3 county intersections. To do this I need to go back
to the original data to find the correct node to use. This was the main
reason why I chose to do the whole county in one go to minimise subsequent
work at the edges of the area I worked on.

I was lucky in Worcestershire as very few parish boundaries were present and
they were fairly easy to sort out by deleting those that only had boundary
tags and removing boundary tags from shared ways. 
I made a note of the numbers of all the existing boundary relations in the
area before I started work so I could update them with my new data. Where my
import matched some one else's import of the district boundary data I
usually kept the earlier work but split it into parish segments. The work
took many evening and late nights to complete.

If anyone wants more specific advice I am willing to provide it - just send
me an email.

Steve



___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Ed Loach]

 It should only be attempted by an experienced mapper who is
 familiar with
 revert and other advanced techniques and can follow the guidelines
 on the
 wiki. The potential to break something is very great, so I would
 question
 making converted data available. Any conversion needs to build the
 relations
 so use something like 'ogr2osm' to create .osm files - a
conversion to
 GPX
 will not do this.

I'll second this. I used to run a boundary validation routine daily
on the British Isles extract from Geofabrik. I stopped it at the end
of March when I was expecting there to be no new extracts until
after the licence change completed, but this thread had me run it
again today. Previously I was fixing broken boundaries if they
remained broken more than a week (in case people were still working
on them), but towards the end of March decided to wait until the
licence change process was complete as that is likely to break some.

Anyway, at the end of March there were 16 admin boundaries listed
here:
http://www.loach.me.uk/osm/boundaries/
(includes false positives at admin levels 2 and 4 as not all
required ways are in the extract). As you can see this has roughly
tripled in the last two months. Whether this is remapping stuff that
has caused it or not I don't know.

Ed

PS: Note in some cases the break might just be an inconsistent use
of roles on member ways.


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Ed Loach]

I mentioned:

 http://www.loach.me.uk/osm/boundaries/

You might notice on the National Parks page I say that the National
England boundaries weren't compatible. Since I designed the page
they have switched to OGL. I might get around to updating the pages
at some point, and also check all source links are still current.

Ed


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-GB] Admin Boundaries and OS OpenData BoundaryLine

[Colin Smale]

Having just taken a look at ogr2osm I think that is probably the best 
way of achieving OSM-data with a view to a bulk import. However there 
are lots of disadvantages and gotcha's on that route as several people 
have pointed out. If we were to take that route there would not be any 
point in going further with the GPX files.


I have prepared a set of GPX files (one per admin area) from the main OS 
shapefiles. What would be the best way to get these into OSM? I guess it 
will be a manual process to split the boundary, create a relation, 
transfer the tags from any existing data, and link everything up. Can 
someone who has experience with such things suggest a workflow? 
Personally I tend to work with Potlatch2, but please let us all know if 
there's a better way. I assume (as someone else already suggested) the 
OS is probably the best source available for this data. So any existing 
admin boundaries (counties/regions etc) will need to be adjusted by hand 
to connect up with the district boundaries from this OS dataset.


I am currently uploading the GPX files to the following (temporary) 
location:

http://csmale.home.xs4all.nl/os/boundaryline/

Please let me know if you find any anomalies in these files!

Colin

On 30/05/2012 00:06, Ed Loach wrote:

It should only be attempted by an experienced mapper who is
familiar with
revert and other advanced techniques and can follow the guidelines
on the
wiki. The potential to break something is very great, so I would
question
making converted data available. Any conversion needs to build the
relations
so use something like 'ogr2osm' to create .osm files - a

conversion to

GPX
will not do this.

I'll second this. I used to run a boundary validation routine daily
on the British Isles extract from Geofabrik. I stopped it at the end
of March when I was expecting there to be no new extracts until
after the licence change completed, but this thread had me run it
again today. Previously I was fixing broken boundaries if they
remained broken more than a week (in case people were still working
on them), but towards the end of March decided to wait until the
licence change process was complete as that is likely to break some.

Anyway, at the end of March there were 16 admin boundaries listed
here:
http://www.loach.me.uk/osm/boundaries/
(includes false positives at admin levels 2 and 4 as not all
required ways are in the extract). As you can see this has roughly
tripled in the last two months. Whether this is remapping stuff that
has caused it or not I don't know.

Ed

PS: Note in some cases the break might just be an inconsistent use
of roles on member ways.


___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb



___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

Re: [Talk-de] Admin-boundaries als Shapefile?

[M∡rtin Koppenhoefer]

es gibt das hier: http://code.google.com/p/osm2shp/
aber ich kann Dir nicht sagen, wie gut das funktioniert.

Hier gibts weitere Informationen:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shp

Gruß Martin

___
Talk-de mailing list
Talk-de@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-de

Re: [Talk-de] Admin-boundaries als Shapefile?

[Jonas Krückel]

Hi,

Am 04.10.2010 um 01:21 schrieb Matthias:

 Hallo,
 
 ich brauche für ein Projekt an der Uni Shapefiles von den
 Regierungsbezirken in Bayern. Bis jetzt habe ich noch nichts
 (kostenloses) vorgefertigtes im Netz gefunden.
 Deshalb habe ich mir jetzt eine OSM-Datei erstellt, die die
 Grenz-Relationen und die zugehörigen Wege enthält, in der Hoffnung,
 daraus etwas brauchbares generieren zu können. Hat jemand schon so etwas
 gemacht?
 Meine erste Idee war, das osmexport-Script zu verwenden, allerdings ist
 mir nicht ganz klar, wie Polygone (und Mulit-Polygone!) exportiert
 werden können. Im Archiv der Mailing-Liste wurde einmal osm-provider
 in Verbindung mit Qgis genannt, und einmal geschrieben, dass OSM-Import
 in QGis ab Version Mimas funktioniert. Hat das jemand schon einmal
 ausprobiert?

Wenn du das OSM-Plugin in QGIS installiert hast, dann kannst du ganz einfach 
ein .osm file öffnen.
Ansonsten kannst du auch mal hier 
http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/utils/export/ nachsehen, besonders 
osm2shp könnte für dich interessant sein.

-Jonas

___
Talk-de mailing list
Talk-de@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-de

Re: [Talk-de] Admin-boundaries als Shapefile?

[Matthias]

Jonas Krückel schrieb:
 Wenn du das OSM-Plugin in QGIS installiert hast, dann kannst du ganz einfach 
 ein .osm file öffnen.
 Ansonsten kannst du auch mal hier 
 http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/utils/export/ nachsehen, besonders 
 osm2shp könnte für dich interessant sein.

 -Jonas
Also das osm2shp werd ich mir mal anschauen. Der Import in Qgis kann
leider nicht mit Multiploygon-Relationen umgehen; wenn das das osm2shp
auch nicht kann, müsste ich mir fast überlegen, da etwas selbst zu
schreiben. Irgendwann.

Letztendlich hab ich dann doch noch ein Admin-boundary-Shapefile
gefunden (das ist bei den Cloudmade-Shapes dabei) und das in Polygone
konvertiert. Wenn man da erst mal alle uninteressanten Grenzen wegwirft
kann man damit auch ganz gut arbeiten (-;


Gruß,

Matthias

___
Talk-de mailing list
Talk-de@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-de

Re: [Talk-de] Admin-boundaries als Shapefile?

[Tom Müller]

 Ich habe meine Shapes damals hiermit erstellt:
http://geoconverter.hsr.ch/index.php
Das klappt einwandfrei mit .osm Daten als Eingabe.

Gruß
Tom


Am 04.10.2010 16:41, schrieb Matthias:

Jonas Krückel schrieb:

Wenn du das OSM-Plugin in QGIS installiert hast, dann kannst du ganz einfach 
ein .osm file öffnen.
Ansonsten kannst du auch mal hier 
http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/utils/export/ nachsehen, besonders 
osm2shp könnte für dich interessant sein.

-Jonas

Also das osm2shp werd ich mir mal anschauen. Der Import in Qgis kann
leider nicht mit Multiploygon-Relationen umgehen; wenn das das osm2shp
auch nicht kann, müsste ich mir fast überlegen, da etwas selbst zu
schreiben. Irgendwann.

Letztendlich hab ich dann doch noch ein Admin-boundary-Shapefile
gefunden (das ist bei den Cloudmade-Shapes dabei) und das in Polygone
konvertiert. Wenn man da erst mal alle uninteressanten Grenzen wegwirft
kann man damit auch ganz gut arbeiten (-;


Gruß,

Matthias

___
Talk-de mailing list
Talk-de@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-de



___
Talk-de mailing list
Talk-de@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-de

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Val Kartchner]

On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 10:57 -0700, am12 wrote:
  I'm saying that abbreviations are part of every day life, and locals know
 
  what to abbreviate and what not to. 
 
 Sure, according to their local usage, which will be inconsistent with local
 usage in other places.  What one local thinks is an obvious abbreviation
 usage because everyone knows it will not be obvious to a map user from
 elsewhere.
 
  How does commercial text-2-speech handle this? 
 
 Unabbreviated, better-structured data.

So, does that mean that street names like 40th Street, for instance
should be expanded to Fortieth Street?

- Val -


___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[am12]

I understand that this is a collaborative project, where standards are as
much defined by what somebody decides to do as anything else.  Neither the
wiki pages nor mailing list opinions (or votes) are definitive mandates. 
Given that, I'll toss my opinion out here.

 I'm saying that abbreviations are part of every day life, and locals know

 what to abbreviate and what not to. 

Sure, according to their local usage, which will be inconsistent with local
usage in other places.  What one local thinks is an obvious abbreviation
usage because everyone knows it will not be obvious to a map user from
elsewhere.

 How does commercial text-2-speech handle this? 

Unabbreviated, better-structured data.

 Can we 
 agree for now that, with appropriate local knowledge, it will be
acceptable
 to strip just these prefixes out of the name tag into another tag? 

Supplemental tags are great, but don't remove it from the name tag. 
Accepted OSM usage is the name tag is the complete full name.  There are
other variations like local_name or alt_name for the shortened version.

  There would have to be both a Something XYZ and a Something 
 ABC in the same general area for you to get lost. 

Apparently you don't have many of these in your local area so you don't
seem too concerned about it.  My local area?  I have them, and it's a pain.

  Multiply this by the 
 already small percentage of both ABC and XYZ being uncommon
abbreviations, 
 and you have a really small set.

And keeping unabbreviated data still eliminates this problem completely.

To me, it's pretty simple: you can go from more data to less easily (full
to abbreviated), but when you extrapolate backwards from less to more you
will lose somewhere.

Remember the mantra about don't tag for the renderer?  It's there for a
reason.  OSM, in philosophy, is not about creating a pretty map.  It is
about creating an underlying map data set, and creating a pretty map is one
of the key uses of it, but not the only one.  Printing abbreviations is a
job for the renderer.  

I understand the feeling that I can't change the renderer myself, but I
can change the data entry myself, so that's the right thing for me to do. 
But it still doesn't make it the best solution.  Let's make the data as
clear and unambiguous as possible, and if the renderer needs fixing, work
on it there.

That's my free opinion, worth every penny :-)

- Alan Millar



___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Val Kartchner]

On Mon, 2010-04-26 at 16:31 -0700, Alan Mintz wrote:
 Good. We also need to settle on a set of component tags to make best use of 
 the information present in those edits -  particularly to separate out 
 cardinal directions from those that are really part of the name. Can we 
 agree for now that, with appropriate local knowledge, it will be acceptable 
 to strip just these prefixes out of the name tag into another tag? Should I 
 propose a set of component tags for a (hopefully quick) vote? The suffixes 
 and root tags could then be populated at the same time (without stripping 
 them from the name).

I second you proposing this.  We need to separate out the prefix, suffix
and root.  Though you need to remember these things when you make your
proposal: http://vidthekid.info/misc/osm-abbr.html

- Val -


___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[andrzej zaborowski]

Hi Alan,

On 24 April 2010 06:33, Alan Mintz alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net wrote:
 At 2010-04-22 13:09, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
  On 22 April 2010 04:24, Alan Mintz alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net wrote:
   At 2010-04-21 17:12, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
  On 22 April 2010 01:18, Apollinaris Schoell ascho...@gmail.com wrote:
    On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:36 PM, andrzej zaborowski balr...@gmail.com
    wrote:
    Where's damage in that -- is it in that you can now read the name out
    without checking the documentation for what that funny string means in
    that particular database that is TIGER?
  
   I just had a machine crash as I was trying to find stats, but I'll bet 
 that
   at least 90% of the cases are St, Ave/Av, and Blvd/Bl, with the
   occasional Ln and Cir/Cr thrown in. When there's a lone N, S, E, or 
 W
   as a prefix to a street name, it's clear to everyone what that means. 
 These
   are the same abbreviations that _everyone_ uses every day - children,
   adults, businesses, governments, etc.
  
  Well, you just gave examples of the obvious ones, I'm not claiming any of
 these are not known.  But the list has 672 different forms.

 My point, though, was that we were going to a lot of trouble for a small
 percentage of real-world cases that _might_ (see below) present a problem
 for someone to understand.

Right, but we don't want to be inconsistent or we again have to keep
lists of exception to the normal rules in every tool.  Even if we
just wanted to document that on the wiki (or elsewhere, really doesn't
need to be wiki) for new mappers, then it would have to say something
like Don't use abbreviations in name=, except final St in English
speaking countries and Foo in Bar speaking countries and... and.. and
so on...  Let's just avoid this area completely.



  (but even the easy ones are hard for non-human consumers because St has
 at least three possible meanings, all three quite popular across the db).

 I'm sorry, but as a suffix (i.e. for the regex / St$/), what else does St
 mean but Street?

Sure you can have a regex for every allowed abbreviation, perhaps a
few regexes for some of the more complicated ones like St before names
of saints, and then for every language and every source of data, at
which point you start having to look at the source= tag or other tags
before you can fully interpret name=, because in TIGER data Stra at
the end is for Stravenue while in other places (nominatim's current
list of abbreviations) Stra at the end is for Straight.



   And I will do so again. My problem is mostly that this was done without a
   safety net. You clobbered existing data with no easy way to walk it
 back...
  
  Well, the way to walk it back is pretty easy, all the names can be
 taken from version-1 or reassembled from the tiger tags, so no worries there.

 This doesn't work for streets that were edited by users. Again, my problem
 is that, in thousands of edits, I specifically only expanded, for example,
 the prefix N to North when it is logically part of the root name. When
 it is logically a housenumber suffix, as it is in the majority of southern
 CA, I left the prefix alone. The road name may have been otherwise edited,
 though (to correct spelling, rename completely, etc.) This was to be used
 in the future when we could agree on a way to correctly separate these
 component parts of the name, as they are and must be in any database to be
 used with routing and street addressing in the real world. To walk it
 back, we will have to query the history of the way and find the version
 before the bot, to see what was done. It's not just v1, or TIGER, because
 it may have been otherwise edited. It's not even v[last-1] any more because
 there may have been other edits since the bot (I've done many myself).

Well I can provide you a list of the original names before I touched
them with the script along with their id's and versions so you can
check if the name has been edited afterwards, if you need to revert
these edits.  Note the edits also contain hundreds if not thousands of
my manual fixes for some frequent typos in TIGER and for some cases of
wrong segmentation into direction_prefix, base_name etc.

 I don't understand. Why do I have to remember them? Am I not capable of
 inferring their meaning? Do I have to infer anything anyway, since they are
 likely to be similar/identical to signage?

You have to if you want to give the name to somebody on the phone or
find a name someone gave you on the phone.

Cheers

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Lord-Castillo, Brett]

-Original Message-
From: Apollinaris Schoell [mailto:ascho...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 23, 2010 9:47 AM
To: Lord-Castillo, Brett
Cc: 'talk-us@openstreetmap.org'
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads


On 23 Apr 2010, at 7:13 , Lord-Castillo, Brett wrote:

 On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:24, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
 On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:07 , Alan Mintz wrote:
 Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide 
 these 
 boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in 
 the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share 
 any 
 nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so 
 I 
 don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything 
 else, this is no longer possible.
 
 fully agree, the good thing is these boundaries are tiger data and bad data 
 anyway and should be replaced with better boundaries
 
 While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the road 
 data, this is not true for the boundary data. Most of the
 boundary data comes directly from recorded surveys (something not available 
 for roads) and is not bad data for most of the United
 States. The rural areas would be the one exception (mostly because they did 
 not have surveys converted to digital layers in 2000), but
  rural areas are also highly likely to have realigned boundary roads that no 
 longer correspond to the original boundaries.
 
 I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are 
 not even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county
 borders from official sources and don't align with natural features, fences 
 which are sometimes visible on Yahoo. 


Yes, California is one of the well-known exceptions. Their LUCA program fell 
apart (and this time around has been split into two separate regions as a 
result). If you take the Midwest states though, like Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri 
with their 300+ counties between them, the TIGER lines are directly from 
official sources, especially the 2009 updates.

Brett Lord-Castillo
Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
St. Louis County Police
Office of Emergency Management
14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
Chesterfield, MO 63017
Office: 314-628-5400 Fax: 314-628-5508 Direct: 314-628-5407

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Brad Neuhauser]

I'd agree with Brett on the boundaries.  The Census data is not
perfect by any means, but it's pretty good, at least in my
area--Minnesota.  (and orders of magnitude better than it was in
2000!)  And if it's not good in your area, you should talk to your
local government and make sure they're participating in the Census'
yearly Boundary  Annexation Survey.
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/bas/bashome.html

I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are not 
even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county borders from official 
sources and don't align with natural features, fences which are sometimes 
visible on Yahoo.

To further respond to this, there is no claim by the Census that it's
survey accuracy, or that it aligns with other data.  Fundamentally, it
is created by the Census for internal purposes, and all TIGER boundary
data is relative to the other TIGER data. (just like a lot of traced
OSM data is relative to the Yahoo imagery)  Everybody gets access to
it for free and you can use it when its good or ignore it when its bad
or modify it when its in between.  The bigger issue with it being
imported into OSM is the currency, because municipal boundaries are
always changing, and as has been mentioned, boundaries are not usually
something that is easily verifiable on the ground

Cheers,
Brad

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 9:54 AM, Lord-Castillo, Brett
blord-casti...@stlouisco.com wrote:






 -Original Message-
 From: Apollinaris Schoell [mailto:ascho...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Friday, April 23, 2010 9:47 AM
 To: Lord-Castillo, Brett
 Cc: 'talk-us@openstreetmap.org'
 Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads


 On 23 Apr 2010, at 7:13 , Lord-Castillo, Brett wrote:

 On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:24, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
 On 19 Apr 2010, at 20:07 , Alan Mintz wrote:
 Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide 
 these
 boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in
 the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share 
 any
 nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so 
 I
 don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything
 else, this is no longer possible.

 fully agree, the good thing is these boundaries are tiger data and bad 
 data anyway and should be replaced with better boundaries

 While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the road 
 data, this is not true for the boundary data. Most of the
 boundary data comes directly from recorded surveys (something not available 
 for roads) and is not bad data for most of the United
 States. The rural areas would be the one exception (mostly because they did 
 not have surveys converted to digital layers in 2000), but
  rural areas are also highly likely to have realigned boundary roads that 
 no longer correspond to the original boundaries.

 I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are 
 not even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county
 borders from official sources and don't align with natural features, fences 
 which are sometimes visible on Yahoo.


 Yes, California is one of the well-known exceptions. Their LUCA program fell 
 apart (and this time around has been split into two separate regions as a 
 result). If you take the Midwest states though, like Iowa, Minnesota, 
 Missouri with their 300+ counties between them, the TIGER lines are directly 
 from official sources, especially the 2009 updates.

 Brett Lord-Castillo
 Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
 St. Louis County Police
 Office of Emergency Management
 14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
 Chesterfield, MO 63017
 Office: 314-628-5400 Fax: 314-628-5508 Direct: 314-628-5407

 ___
 Talk-us mailing list
 Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
 http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us


___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Anthony]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Brad Neuhauser
brad.neuhau...@gmail.comwrote:

 The bigger issue with it being
 imported into OSM is the currency, because municipal boundaries are
 always changing, and as has been mentioned, boundaries are not usually
 something that is easily verifiable on the ground


I'd say the biggest issue is the fact that, when the census bureau couldn't
find data on municipalities, they decided to just make shit up.  They
picked some arbitrary boundary which had roughly the right number of people
in it, and then named it after an actual place which happened to be nearby.

The CDPs are horrible when used for any purpose other than interpreting
census data.  I really wish the census bureau had named them CDP 1283,
CDP 1284, CDP 1285, etc.
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-04-23 18:11, Anthony
wrote:

A navi system is more useful if the instructions and signs
match.


Depends on your purpose. If you're trying to navigate to the
missigned street (e.g. California Street, where the sign
reads Carolina Street), you don't want to get a response of
street not found. For most other purposes you'd rather
have the incorrect name (at least until it gets 
fixed).
Yeah - this is always a quandary. In my experience, the street sign
usually ends up being right anyway, so I'm usually asking the
responsible authority to fix their GIS and/or the source map (yes, even
tract maps that are decades old :) ). I don't really consider this as
original research, since it's really a matter of reconciling
sources, but it's admittedly time consuming and requires additional
research that many mappers (understandably) may not want to do. Still, I
think it's value that I can add, not only to OSM, but also for my fellow
citizens.
When the sign is wrong, I notify the signing authority and, if it seems
that they intend to fix it soon (the usual case), I put the correct value
in the name tag and the signed value in the alt_name tag, with a note tag
describing the situation. If there is no easy contact with the authority,
or it seems they may not fix it soon, I reverse the tagging. Either way,
there are notes/FIXMEs there to remind me (or others) to survey again in
the future.
BTW, technically, I would call surveying/photographing, and then mapping
based on it, original research :)
P.S.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/56123368
is one of those strange cases where it's been signed and likely known wrong according to the cited docs, because the signed name is more logical in context. I name'd it as signed and put the recorded name in the official_name tag instead. If there's anyone nearby that would like to have a look, It'd be useful to know how it's signed at the intersection with Outer Traffic Circle here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/122696036 .

--
Alan Mintz alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net



___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-04-23 07:47, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
  While I understand the mantra of TIGER=Bad because of the state of the 
 road data, this is not true for the boundary data. Most of the boundary 
 data comes directly from recorded surveys (something not available for 
 roads) and is not bad data for most of the United States. The rural 
 areas would be the one exception (mostly because they did not have 
 surveys converted to digital layers in 2000), but rural areas are also 
 highly likely to have realigned boundary roads that no longer correspond 
 to the original boundaries.
 

I can tell for sure that they are completely wrong in California. They are 
not even close to USGS 24k, don't align with official county borders from 
official sources and don't align with natural features, fences which are 
sometimes visible on Yahoo.

I don't know about completely. The parts of the Kern/LA/Orange/San 
Bernardino/Riverside/San Diego borders that I have surveyed are at least 
close to the signage at important points (admittedly a weak standard), but 
I've also gone hunting for detail in law in some spots and found that the 
borders were right as of their date of creation in the source data. I 
remember manually fixing a little bit of the OC/LA border in La Habra from 
some sort of change description - maybe something out the BAS project. What 
a pain that was.

Is anyone working on borders currently? Is the BAS a reasonable source?

--
Alan Mintz alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net


___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-04-22 13:33, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
 On 22 April 2010 17:40, Apollinaris Schoell ascho...@gmail.com wrote:
  On 21 Apr 2010, at 17:12 , andrzej zaborowski wrote:
  The signs are posted there by authorities so this is similar to having
  access to a tiny piece of a map or database made by these authorities.
  For maps people usually agreed on this list that we don't trust them.
 
 
  are you saying authorities are wrong and we should correct what they 
are doing and follow tiger or USPS standards instead?
 
 I'm saying we should name the objects what they're called, not what it is 
written as in somebody's database.

what they're called, though, may indeed be from somebody's database, 
when that database is the county recorder's or assessor's. The recorder, in 
particular, should be the truth by definition, except when you can see that 
there's an obvious mistake and can confirm it with them.

--
Alan Mintz alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net


___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Apollinaris Schoell]

On 23 Apr 2010, at 19:46 , Alan Mintz wrote:

 At 2010-04-23 07:47, Apollinaris Schoell wrote:
 
 I don't know about completely. The parts of the Kern/LA/Orange/San 
 Bernardino/Riverside/San Diego borders that I have surveyed are at least 
 close to the signage at important points (admittedly a weak standard), but 
 I've also gone hunting for detail in law in some spots and found that the 
 borders were right as of their date of creation in the source data. I 
 remember manually fixing a little bit of the OC/LA border in La Habra from 
 some sort of change description - maybe something out the BAS project. What 
 a pain that was.
 

depends on the definition, for me a difference of 100-200m is too bad. any GPS 
or verbal description is better if matched with Yahoo. In some corners even 
worse complex edges have been entirely clipped.
USGS is pretty good and matches county borders. County borders are from 
official state data and are high accuracy. Also Sat matches well when borders 
follow natural features.
USGS tracing is very difficult because borders are often hard to identify among 
other features.


 Is anyone working on borders currently? Is the BAS a reasonable source?

what is BAS? any better source will be useful

 
 --
 Alan Mintz alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net
 
 
 ___
 Talk-us mailing list
 Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
 http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us


___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-04-22 13:09, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
 On 22 April 2010 04:24, Alan Mintz alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net wrote:
  At 2010-04-21 17:12, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
 On 22 April 2010 01:18, Apollinaris Schoell ascho...@gmail.com wrote:
   On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:36 PM, andrzej zaborowski balr...@gmail.com
   wrote:
   Where's damage in that -- is it in that you can now read the name out
   without checking the documentation for what that funny string means in
   that particular database that is TIGER?
 
  I just had a machine crash as I was trying to find stats, but I'll bet that
  at least 90% of the cases are St, Ave/Av, and Blvd/Bl, with the
  occasional Ln and Cir/Cr thrown in. When there's a lone N, S, E, or W
  as a prefix to a street name, it's clear to everyone what that means. These
  are the same abbreviations that _everyone_ uses every day - children,
  adults, businesses, governments, etc.
 
 Well, you just gave examples of the obvious ones, I'm not claiming any of 
these are not known.  But the list has 672 different forms.

My point, though, was that we were going to a lot of trouble for a small 
percentage of real-world cases that _might_ (see below) present a problem 
for someone to understand.


 (but even the easy ones are hard for non-human consumers because St has 
at least three possible meanings, all three quite popular across the db).

I'm sorry, but as a suffix (i.e. for the regex / St$/), what else does St 
mean but Street?


  And I will do so again. My problem is mostly that this was done without a
  safety net. You clobbered existing data with no easy way to walk it 
back...
 
 Well, the way to walk it back is pretty easy, all the names can be 
taken from version-1 or reassembled from the tiger tags, so no worries there.

This doesn't work for streets that were edited by users. Again, my problem 
is that, in thousands of edits, I specifically only expanded, for example, 
the prefix N to North when it is logically part of the root name. When 
it is logically a housenumber suffix, as it is in the majority of southern 
CA, I left the prefix alone. The road name may have been otherwise edited, 
though (to correct spelling, rename completely, etc.) This was to be used 
in the future when we could agree on a way to correctly separate these 
component parts of the name, as they are and must be in any database to be 
used with routing and street addressing in the real world. To walk it 
back, we will have to query the history of the way and find the version 
before the bot, to see what was done. It's not just v1, or TIGER, because 
it may have been otherwise edited. It's not even v[last-1] any more because 
there may have been other edits since the bot (I've done many myself).


 ...Then TIGER also includes Spanish names and the
 list has abbreviations for those too, which rarely anyone in US can
 read, while they can cope with unabbreviated ok.
 
  I don't agree. Much of the US speaks Spanish. Many more possess the
  tremendous brainpower and enoUGH grade-school Spanish required to know that
  Cl. in front of a street name might mean Calle or Cam. might mean Camino,
  or that S means Sur and N means Norte.
 
 But do you remember the 600 abbreviations used in tiger?  It's neither 
practical or useful or helps anyone, they're much like numerical 
codes.  The one single thing they may be good for is for rendering at lower 
zoom levels.

I don't understand. Why do I have to remember them? Am I not capable of 
inferring their meaning? Do I have to infer anything anyway, since they are 
likely to be similar/identical to signage? Also, to me lower zoom levels 
is almost any level at which I want to see a map. Anything more than a 
small neighborhood, and it's all we can do just to fit the root of the name 
in - we don't need any _more_ characters.


  name: The pre-balrog name
 
 99% percent of the cases this was an arbitrary version of name, taken 
from a database which was chosen only on the basis of its license, not 
because it was more correct or anything.  So I don't see any reason to hang 
on to it.

If I understand you correctly, I disagree completely. In my experience in 
southern CA, 90% of the time, TIGER is correct with the exception of the 
presence of the directional prefix. The real problem was the geometry[1].


  In the Los Angeles area, I rarely saw expanded names (which is why I
  continue to abbreviate), except for those rare instances where someone drew
  a street from scratch before TIGER (apparently), and not even all of those.

BTW, from my previously cited data chunk (35988 unique names in about 4400 
sq mi (11000 sq km) of southern CA) , I can now say that only ~0.2% of 
suffixes were present in their expanded form (i.e. Street, Avenue, etc.).


 You could surely change the wiki but it's a conclusion that a lot of
 people individually seem to come to so I'm sure you wouldn't even need
 a bot before someone would add a phrase to that effect.
 
  I don't know 

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 22 April 2010 04:24, Alan Mintz alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net wrote:
 At 2010-04-21 17:12, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
On 22 April 2010 01:18, Apollinaris Schoell ascho...@gmail.com wrote:
  On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:36 PM, andrzej zaborowski balr...@gmail.com
  wrote:
  Where's damage in that -- is it in that you can now read the name out
  without checking the documentation for what that funny string means in
  that particular database that is TIGER?

 I just had a machine crash as I was trying to find stats, but I'll bet that
 at least 90% of the cases are St, Ave/Av, and Blvd/Bl, with the
 occasional Ln and Cir/Cr thrown in. When there's a lone N, S, E, or W
 as a prefix to a street name, it's clear to everyone what that means. These
 are the same abbreviations that _everyone_ uses every day - children,
 adults, businesses, governments, etc.

Well, you just gave examples of the obvious ones, I'm not claiming any
of these are not known.  But the list has 672 different forms.
(but even the easy ones are hard for non-human consumers because St
has at least three possible meanings, all three quite popular across
the db).

 And I will do so again. My problem is mostly that this was done without a
 safety net. You clobbered existing data with no easy way to walk it back.
 The existing name value should have been put in a foo_name tag so we could
 at least see what used to be. I would at least encourage that a bot be run
 to find these edits, find the previous version in history, and do this, if
 we can't soon agree on a better schema to split the name up into components
 at the same time.

Well, the way to walk it back is pretty easy, all the names can be
taken from version-1 or reassembled from the tiger tags, so no worries
there.


I don't know who defined the ones used in TIGER but this is not the
only way to abbreviate the names, that is proven by USPS having their
own list that is not identical.  The most popular words will be the
same in both lists but some are really cryptic and arbitrary, could as
well be numeric codes.  Then TIGER also includes Spanish names and the
list has abbreviations for those too, which rarely anyone in US can
read, while they can cope with unabbreviated ok.

 I don't agree. Much of the US speaks Spanish. Many more possess the
 tremendous brainpower and enoUGH grade-school Spanish required to know that
 Cl. in front of a street name might mean Calle or Cam. might mean Camino,
 or that S means Sur and N means Norte.

But do you remember the 600 abbreviations used in tiger?  It's neither
practical or useful or helps anyone, they're much like numerical
codes.  The one single thing they may be good for is for rendering at
lower zoom levels.




 name: The pre-balrog name

99% percent of the cases this was an arbitrary version of name, taken
from a database which was chosen only on the basis of its license, not
because it was more correct or anything.  So I don't see any reason to
hang on to it.


  The reason it was done with a script is that doing it manually was
  taking a lot of time and mappers were spending that time doing this
  instead of going out mapping. Â And it's always been on the wiki about
  not using abbreviated names, even when the original import was done,
  ignoring this.

 So what most newbies, including myself, did, was to follow the style of the
 majority of the data, instead of the often-outdated, incomplete, and
 inaccurate wiki, which is often not even self-consistent.

The majority of the data in this case was an imported dataset that
hasn't even been fully reviewed by a human, so while I agree learning
by example is a good way to make a quick start, it doesn't mean if you
followed the example then it's the only correct way to go.
I'm not using wiki as an argument to tell you what you should do, but
I think it's a good way to see what others were thinking.  I have
never edited the Key:name page, and I had never read it before
noticing that using abbreviations in a dataset that is supposed to be
parseable is a recipe for problems.



 In the Los Angeles area, I rarely saw expanded names (which is why I
 continue to abbreviate), except for those rare instances where someone drew
 a street from scratch before TIGER (apparently), and not even all of those.


You could surely change the wiki but it's a conclusion that a lot of
people individually seem to come to so I'm sure you wouldn't even need
a bot before someone would add a phrase to that effect.

 I don't know about a lot. I mostly just hear people regurgitate the
 don't abbreviate mantra without justification. Admittedly, maybe it's
 because it's already been hashed out to death and I'm late to the party.
 Regardless, maybe I'm not alone, and it deserves some re-thinking.

 Do people that are actually mapping (not bulk-importers) really want to
 type in North Martin Luther King, Junior Boulevard Southwest and then
 proofread that to make sure they didn't typo anything?

It completely depends on what 

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 22 April 2010 17:40, Apollinaris Schoell ascho...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 21 Apr 2010, at 17:12 , andrzej zaborowski wrote:
 The signs are posted there by authorities so this is similar to having
 access to a tiny piece of a map or database made by these authorities.
 For maps people usually agreed on this list that we don't trust them.


 are you saying authorities are wrong and we should correct what they are 
 doing and follow tiger or USPS standards instead?

I'm saying we should name the objects what they're called, not what it
is written as in somebody's database.


 Is the wiki any better as a reference than what is in the osm DB? I could
 change the wiki and then will someone write a bot to reverse it? Is the wiki
 written with the situation in US in mind?

 Well one good rule is if there should be any rules then they should be 
 global.


 no not at all. US is very different in many aspects and has to be done 
 different. several countries don't use abbrev names on maps or addresses. 
 Most street names don't even have a st/ave/blvd/ct … postfix at all and so 
 there is no reason to even discuss this topic. And in case they use abbrev 
 it's only when there is a need to shorten. But all official use will be 
 expanded. But in US it looks very much it's the opposite. abbrev is the 
 standard use model and expanded name is the exception

Seriously?  I can't think of a single place in Europe where the
street part is not commonly abbreviated just like what you describe
(maybe Germany, but I wouldn't know).  Just look at some paper maps or
postal addresses, or google, you will very rarely find the names
spelled out in full.  In the UK it's pretty much like in the US with
regard to the feature type suffix (St/Ave...) ([1]) but people have
been fixing it in OSM for some time, in Germany I think they use Str.
though not sure how commonly.  In all the slavic countries Street is
abbreviated as ul. prefix and Avenue as al. practically always
(just look at Belarus in OSM), in Hungary it's a Ut. prefix, in
Spain C/ (although the OSM community there agreed to not go with the
popular forms and spell everything out and put in any optional
articles someone might possibly squeeze in when referring to the
street -- basically use the longest form, to avoid ambiguity.  So you
won't find C/ in OSM even though it's on the signs), in Turkey it's
Sk. for sokak, in Greece it's something like Od, I don't remember
exactly.  Someone on IRC yesterday asked whether they should put the
Greek names in all caps because the street signs are in all caps.  I
guess your anwser would be yes, they should?

Cheers

1. http://osm.org/go/erdGBcIdM-

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 20 April 2010 05:24, Apollinaris Schoell ascho...@gmail.com wrote:
 Sounds a lot like the IMO ill-considered road name expansion that was
 apparently agreed upon by a small group of people without input from the
 majority of active mappers whose work has been damaged.

 agreed, no idea why this was done. it's a change without much benefit but 
 lot's of damage.

Where's damage in that -- is it in that you can now read the name out
without checking the documentation for what that funny string means in
that particular database that is TIGER?  You can now also write an
intelligent search engine that will understand both forms, you can
pipe the names through text-to-speach and do a lot more.

The reason it was done with a script is that doing it manually was
taking a lot of time and mappers were spending that time doing this
instead of going out mapping.  And it's always been on the wiki about
not using abbreviated names, even when the original import was done,
ignoring this.

Cheers

___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-04-21 17:12, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
On 22 April 2010 01:18, Apollinaris Schoell ascho...@gmail.com wrote:
  On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 3:36 PM, andrzej zaborowski balr...@gmail.com
  wrote:
  Where's damage in that -- is it in that you can now read the name out
  without checking the documentation for what that funny string means in
  that particular database that is TIGER?

I just had a machine crash as I was trying to find stats, but I'll bet that 
at least 90% of the cases are St, Ave/Av, and Blvd/Bl, with the 
occasional Ln and Cir/Cr thrown in. When there's a lone N, S, E, or W 
as a prefix to a street name, it's clear to everyone what that means. These 
are the same abbreviations that _everyone_ uses every day - children, 
adults, businesses, governments, etc.

Even when travelling to another country, it takes me very little time to 
understand what common abbreviations are used for in addresses.


  there is damage by doing it wrong, others have pointed to it already.

And I will do so again. My problem is mostly that this was done without a 
safety net. You clobbered existing data with no easy way to walk it back. 
The existing name value should have been put in a foo_name tag so we could 
at least see what used to be. I would at least encourage that a bot be run 
to find these edits, find the previous version in history, and do this, if 
we can't soon agree on a better schema to split the name up into components 
at the same time.


  I am not deep enough into the history of the abbreviations used and who
  defined them. But I am pretty sure there is a lot of errors.

Errors that I, and a lot of other mappers, painstakingly fixed by hand, 
based on ground surveys and research into public records. In particular, 
I'm worried about the cases where I spelled out North because it was 
actually part of the name, as opposed to a cardinal direction related to 
addresses, which I left alone, hoping to later move the latter directions 
to a addr:direction_prefix tag, while leaving the former along. I can no 
longer distinguish between the two.



I don't know who defined the ones used in TIGER but this is not the
only way to abbreviate the names, that is proven by USPS having their
own list that is not identical.  The most popular words will be the
same in both lists but some are really cryptic and arbitrary, could as
well be numeric codes.  Then TIGER also includes Spanish names and the
list has abbreviations for those too, which rarely anyone in US can
read, while they can cope with unabbreviated ok.

I don't agree. Much of the US speaks Spanish. Many more possess the 
tremendous brainpower and enoUGH grade-school Spanish required to know that 
Cl. in front of a street name might mean Calle or Cam. might mean Camino, 
or that S means Sur and N means Norte.


  - in the city I live there is no street sign with street, avenue, 
 boulevard,
   and even more surprising there are no abbreviations either. osm
  principle is to map what's on the ground. So tiger import is definitely
  wrong and expanding the names is also wrong. on the other hand postal
  address usually use it in one or the other form so it's not completely
  fiction.

Exactly. Many places in Orange County have the bad habit of leaving the 
suffix off the large street signs at intersections, perhaps as a way of 
saving space to reduce sign size and cost. Just because the big sign says 
just Orange doesn't mean that the street's real name is Orange Street, nor 
that it shouldn't be entered into any reasonable database or map that way. 
map what's on the ground is the wrong thing to do so often that I don't 
really understand why it was decided upon, nor why people continue hold it 
up on a pedestal, despite continuing problems with it.


For the record street signs on different ends of the same street often
use different forms and you'll sometimes find really strange
conventions, so while I agree mapping what's on the ground is good
because stuff can be confirmed, in this case it's not a solution.  In
many places you'll find the names are all caps on the signs but in a
local newspaper they're capitalized the usual way.

And the signs are sometimes wrong. In the thousands of streets I've 
photographed and mapped, I've corrected hundreds of signage 
errors/inconsistencies, often requiring substantial research into records, 
and resulting in notification of the appropriate authority to fix the 
records and/or signs (for free :( ).


  - many geocding engines do not find expanded names. even google doesn't in
  many cases. To me it looks like nearly anyone doesn't use the expanded name
  at all. So my question is is the expanded name really the correct name?

Exactly! Sounds like it's only useful purpose is text-2-speech. Here's what 
I'd like to see:

name: The pre-balrog name
name_direction_prefix: The 1-2 char cardinal direction before the root
use_name_direction_prefix: {yes|no} Yes indicates that the 
name_direction_prefix 

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Richard Welty]

On 4/20/10 3:44 AM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
 Hi,

 Alan Mintz wrote:

 At 2010-04-19 10:45, Mike N. wrote:
  
I see that the separate VS tangled argument has been settled in the US by
 the Duplicate Node attack bots, who have blindly merged all duplicate
 nodes.

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/38855677

 Is this really happening? Can someone describe exactly what criteria are
 being used, and just how it was decided that this was a good idea?
  
 It seems that someone is, more or less blindly, using the JOSM validator
 de-duplication. Doesn't look like a bot but, as Richard said, has
 similar results.

given the way that it is currently set up, i'll wager that a lot of less 
experienced
josm users are doing this, because the validator, in its current form, 
leads them
down this path.

richard


___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Ian Dees]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 12:45 PM, Mike N. nice...@att.net wrote:

 From an old message:

  I take the point that 'road realignment' may
  require the boundary also to move, but the word is MAY and so what ever
  happens
  to the road, the location of the boundary needs to be checked separately!
  It is
  quite surprising in the UK how many roads are being moved, but that does
  not
  also move the original boundary.

  I see that the separate VS tangled argument has been settled in the US by
 the Duplicate Node attack bots, who have blindly merged all duplicate
 nodes.

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/38855677


When I imported GNIS last year, a fairly significant portion of the data
(2-5%) had POI with coordinates exactly the same as another POI (e.g. a post
office inside a town hall building). I wonder what these duplicate nod bots
are doing with those nodes...
___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Richard Welty]

On 4/19/10 1:45 PM, Mike N. wrote:
  From an old message:


 I take the point that 'road realignment' may
 require the boundary also to move, but the word is MAY and so what ever
 happens
 to the road, the location of the boundary needs to be checked separately!
 It is
 quite surprising in the UK how many roads are being moved, but that does
 not
 also move the original boundary.
  
I see that the separate VS tangled argument has been settled in the US by
 the Duplicate Node attack bots, who have blindly merged all duplicate
 nodes.

 http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/38855677

i don't know if settled is the word for it, the debate is still open, 
but currently the
josm validator reports duplicate nodes as errors, and provides a fix 
button that
merges them. it's not fully automated like a bot, but the result is 
effectively the same.

richard


___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

Re: [Talk-us] Admin boundaries tied to roads

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-04-19 10:45, Mike N. wrote:
   I see that the separate VS tangled argument has been settled in the US by
the Duplicate Node attack bots, who have blindly merged all duplicate
nodes.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/38855677

Is this really happening? Can someone describe exactly what criteria are 
being used, and just how it was decided that this was a good idea? Seems 
like the wrong thing to do - city and county boundaries are often defined 
in law, or by survey, and do not necessarily keep up with changes in road 
alignment. I have resisted editing most of these boundaries until/unless I 
take the time to research the true definition of the boundary.

Not to mention that merging them will result in the inability to hide these 
boundaries. When doing a bunch of editing on a road that follows one, in 
the past, I've taken the time to verify that the boundary doesn't share any 
nodes with anything and then remove it from my local OSM file manually so I 
don't have to constantly deal with it. If it shares nodes with anything 
else, this is no longer possible.

Sounds a lot like the IMO ill-considered road name expansion that was 
apparently agreed upon by a small group of people without input from the 
majority of active mappers whose work has been damaged.

--
Alan Mintz alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net


___
Talk-us mailing list
Talk-us@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us

[talk-au] admin boundaries on garmin

[edodd]

I used my garmin oregon 550 in the car on the way to Canberra yesterday.
Messed up a bit because i hadn't put a routable map on it, so had Navit on
the netbook on the passengers seat to assist me.
However I noted that the OSM map on the Garmin clearly shows the admin
boundaries with names - I was seeing the postcode or suburb boundaries
(not sure which). Not helpful overall on a small screen.
Anyone else got any comments (do we change our admin boundaries or deal
with mkgmap)
Liz


___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

Re: [talk-au] admin boundaries on garmin

[John Henderson]

ed...@billiau.net wrote:
 I used my garmin oregon 550 in the car on the way to Canberra yesterday.
 Messed up a bit because i hadn't put a routable map on it, so had Navit on
 the netbook on the passengers seat to assist me.
 However I noted that the OSM map on the Garmin clearly shows the admin
 boundaries with names - I was seeing the postcode or suburb boundaries
 (not sure which). Not helpful overall on a small screen.
 Anyone else got any comments (do we change our admin boundaries or deal
 with mkgmap)

One of the reasons I make my own Garmin maps is to suppress all admin 
boundaries.

Many times in the early days I found myself driving an unmapped road 
which was also an admin boundary, and didn't log that section as a gpx 
file because I mistook the boundary display for a highway.

John H

___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

Re: [talk-au] admin boundaries on garmin

[Steve Bennett]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:57 AM,  ed...@billiau.net wrote:
 I used my garmin oregon 550 in the car on the way to Canberra yesterday.
 Messed up a bit because i hadn't put a routable map on it, so had Navit on
 the netbook on the passengers seat to assist me.
 However I noted that the OSM map on the Garmin clearly shows the admin
 boundaries with names - I was seeing the postcode or suburb boundaries
 (not sure which). Not helpful overall on a small screen.
 Anyone else got any comments (do we change our admin boundaries or deal
 with mkgmap)

This isn't so much a Garmin issue as an issue in how you convert OSM
to Garmin. Presumably you're downloading the converted maps from
http://osmaustralia.org/downloads.php . Now, I've talked to Matt White
about that issue (and a few others - notably buildings don't render),
and he knows and agrees, and has sent me the relevant files to fix,
but neither of us has had the time to do anything about it. I'm very
interested in improving this stuff, but just can't find the time atm.

Anyway, try giving Matt a buzz (m...@osmaustralia.org) and maybe he can help.

Steve

___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

Re: [talk-au] admin boundaries on garmin

[Greg Harper]

 I have found the admin boundaries (suburbs were giving me the most grief)
are really misleading for navigation too, particularly on smaller screens as
Liz mentioned.

I prefer to grab the ones from here osmaustralia.org as I don't have time to
build my own. So when he does fix it, it will be appreciated. Maybe he could
filter out private pools while he is at it. :-)


Cheers,
Greg




On 24 February 2010 10:25, Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:57 AM,  ed...@billiau.net wrote:
  I used my garmin oregon 550 in the car on the way to Canberra yesterday.
  Messed up a bit because i hadn't put a routable map on it, so had Navit
 on
  the netbook on the passengers seat to assist me.
  However I noted that the OSM map on the Garmin clearly shows the admin
  boundaries with names - I was seeing the postcode or suburb boundaries
  (not sure which). Not helpful overall on a small screen.
  Anyone else got any comments (do we change our admin boundaries or deal
  with mkgmap)

 This isn't so much a Garmin issue as an issue in how you convert OSM
 to Garmin. Presumably you're downloading the converted maps from
 http://osmaustralia.org/downloads.php . Now, I've talked to Matt White
 about that issue (and a few others - notably buildings don't render),
 and he knows and agrees, and has sent me the relevant files to fix,
 but neither of us has had the time to do anything about it. I'm very
 interested in improving this stuff, but just can't find the time atm.

 Anyway, try giving Matt a buzz (m...@osmaustralia.org) and maybe he can
 help.

 Steve

 ___
 Talk-au mailing list
 Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
 http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

[talk-au] admin boundaries

[edodd]

just had a look at australia and we have some rogue admin boundaries in NT
on Barkly Tablelands and in North SA
http://osm.org/go/s...@go


___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au

Re: [talk-au] admin boundaries

[John Smith]

2009/10/10  ed...@billiau.net:
 just had a look at australia and we have some rogue admin boundaries in NT
 on Barkly Tablelands and in North SA
 http://osm.org/go/s...@go

Hmmm I think it was probably a cp mistake I made when fixing up post
code boundaries, I must have copied the state boundaries when fixing
up the tags pasted from Franc's OSM files.

___
Talk-au mailing list
Talk-au@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au